Angela Hennessy’s Forecast: Precipitation On the Way
Aeromancers (or more specifically “nephomancers”) are individuals who meditate on the clouds in order to divine the future. During the medieval era in Europe, they would practice their craft by summoning the ghosts of ancestors, requesting that they project spectral images from the future onto clouds so that their earth-bound brethren might know what would happen next. Nephomancers believe that the past, present and future form a telling continuum—so long as one is willing to study the heavens and trust in something that will perpetually transform and ultimately disappear
Perhaps we are all nephomancers to some degree or another. When we hear a radio voice announce today’s forecast as “partly cloudy,” our first instinct is to move to the bedroom window and glance up at the sky. Will those random and constantly changing vaporous shapes produce rain or burn away by the day’s end? Does their location and shade of grey promise physical relief or potential threat, and how will that vision shape our mood? Clouds can be disturbingly ambiguous or comforting in their predictability. Even if we no longer assume that ghosts have inscribed messages on them for our benefit, our mundane “readings” of clouds trigger a multitude of unconscious dreads and deep-seeded desires on a daily basis.
Likewise, Angela Hennessy’s recent “Partly Cloudy” installation at Ampersand International Arts evokes the psychological weight we inadvertently invest in those insubstantial, fantastic forms, reminding us that weather doubles as a psychic metaphor. She sets accumulated black strands against the gallery’s white walls to resemble a morose bank of clouds, and extends their threads downward to mimic sublime rain showers on a distant horizon.
Trained in traditional textile production, Hennessy literally “undoes” her own history as a maker when fabricating these clouds: she slowly and relentlessly unravels black velvet, shredding it so that its materiality is barely recognizable. The by-product of this mesmerizing, laborious process is loose black fuzz that resembles discarded nappy hair. Hennessy plays off the fact that black velvet—with its “uncanny” evocations of erogenous luxury— is also slang for African American women. She sweeps up these nappy piles from her studio floor to create “Hemisphere,” a perverse postcolonial simulation of a Victorian era paperweight. As cultural critic Celeste Olalquiaga explains in her eccentric book, The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience(Pantheon, 1999), Victorians were in the habit of encasing once vital flora and fauna in glass, forever reducing them to generic specimens for visual pleasure. Unnerved by mass industrialization and obsessed with death, they fetishized carefully preserved objects on their parlor shelves: the more exotic, the more entrancing. Hennessy’s dark clouds and sculptural forms are particularly unsettling because we don’t know which specific narratives her meditations have conjured, yet they feel familiar and haunted, and harbor a quiet sense of urgency. Her aesthetic sensibility is both elegant and gothic. It manifests our futile desire to fossilize social histories as well as personal memories—even painful ones— in an ongoing effort to divine the future, ephemeral as it may be.
LYDIA MATTHEWS
Velvet
A texture can be violent as a poem written to invite transgression. Poetry: text of what is vulnerable. Something delicate as a textile woven in a context of vulnerability can be an invitation to violence. The artist who works with velvet knows that well as she takes it apart, as she deconstructs it in order to understand it: velvet is a like a text that is being read to find in it the poetry of delicate dissolution. She knows that velvet can be separated with fingers; that it can be translated into fuzz and thread. She knows that fingernails can take it apart, can unweave it, unravel it, so that out of that disintegration something unknown can take place. She knows that once separated its elements talk to each other with longing and that this longing creates a tension between them: she somehow negotiates this tension when she puts them back together, once she has translated the chaos of dissolution into meaning. The chaos of momentary death into fragile resurrection.
JUVENAL ACOSTA
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