Prop Master at Charleston's Gibbes Museum of Art
Susan Harbage Page, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill
Juan Logan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Juan Logan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Exhibit Sections:
Introduction | Prop Allocations or Accents for Gracious Living | Famous Last Names | Sexually Ambiguous | Background Material | Welcome Home | Expressions of Affection | Recommended Resources
Background Material, 2009
Juan Logan and Susan Harbage Page
Wood, fabric, paint, and paper
Wood, fabric, paint, and paper
Juan Logan's Background Material: Wallpaper, a stenciled grid of tiny
heads, fills the area of the gallery wall between chair rail and picture rail
typically
reserved for conventional works of art. Painted in Lancaster Whitewash, a color
close to that of the wall, the pattern is not immediately recognized as composed
of hundreds of impassive heads. Wallpaper visualizes how African Americans
were not acknowledged as subjects but treated as if invisible, even when waiting
on someone at the dinner table. These heads, endlessly repeated, suggest how
racist imagery reduces people to anonymous caricatures. Logan distilled
the shape of these heads from pernicious stereotypes (the form also appears
in Portrait of Denmark Vesey and his video Welcome
Home). African Americans
were considered background, as much in the museum as on the plantation,
even though their labor sustained the inegalitarian society they were compelled
to serve.
Susan Harbage Page's Background Material: Columns refer to the often unacknowledged but critical social function of privileged women. Framing the entrance to the exhibition, the pair of semi-circular, yet massive, fabric columns signifies how women prop up the social structure. Each column displays the digitally altered, archival photograph (from the Gibbes image archive of past museum openings) depicting a well-dressed, smiling woman serving cookies to a man. Doubled in mirrored reverse, she faces two directions as if to serve all sides at once. Stretched out of proportion, she becomes an abstraction. Her elongated form fits the pillars, which she graces as the upholder of social codes and rituals, and as decorative object and interior designer, suggesting her complicity in maintaining a rigidly divided society. One cannot identify the figure when close-up, due to the image's pixilation, but only from a distance. This suggests how difficult it can be to understand one's culture when immersed within it.
Page's Background Material: Chair Rail Frieze also appropriates and transforms an archival photograph to consider how women sustain social customs, mores, and values. Following the chair rail around the gallery, separating exhibition wall space from that below, Page's frieze shows mirrored iterations of a cropped and abstracted photograph. The photograph, selected from the Gibbes Museum archives of images from past openings, depicts a well-dressed woman's hands, delicately serving cookies, which a man's hands contentedly take. Tracing the room, the replication of the image indicates how such actions have recurred innumerable times and how they continue into the present.
 |
Juan Logan, Background
Material: Wallpaper behind Sexually
Ambiguous, Charleston, South Carolina, 2009. Photo: Rick
Rhodes. |
Susan Harbage Page's Background Material: Columns refer to the often unacknowledged but critical social function of privileged women. Framing the entrance to the exhibition, the pair of semi-circular, yet massive, fabric columns signifies how women prop up the social structure. Each column displays the digitally altered, archival photograph (from the Gibbes image archive of past museum openings) depicting a well-dressed, smiling woman serving cookies to a man. Doubled in mirrored reverse, she faces two directions as if to serve all sides at once. Stretched out of proportion, she becomes an abstraction. Her elongated form fits the pillars, which she graces as the upholder of social codes and rituals, and as decorative object and interior designer, suggesting her complicity in maintaining a rigidly divided society. One cannot identify the figure when close-up, due to the image's pixilation, but only from a distance. This suggests how difficult it can be to understand one's culture when immersed within it.
 |
Susan Harbage Page, Background
Material: Columns, Charleston, South Carolina, 2009.
Photo: Rick Rhodes. |
Page's Background Material: Chair Rail Frieze also appropriates and transforms an archival photograph to consider how women sustain social customs, mores, and values. Following the chair rail around the gallery, separating exhibition wall space from that below, Page's frieze shows mirrored iterations of a cropped and abstracted photograph. The photograph, selected from the Gibbes Museum archives of images from past openings, depicts a well-dressed woman's hands, delicately serving cookies, which a man's hands contentedly take. Tracing the room, the replication of the image indicates how such actions have recurred innumerable times and how they continue into the present.
 |
Susan Harbage Page, Background
Material: Chair Rail Frieze, Charleston, South Carolina,
2009. Photo: Rick Rhodes.
|
Exhibit Sections:
Introduction | Prop Allocations or Accents for Gracious Living | Famous Last Names | Sexually Ambiguous | Background Material | Welcome Home | Expressions of Affection | Recommended Resources
