Branch Gallery downtown is enveloped in the art of the surreal this month.
Its two fall exhibits, local artist Stacy-Lynn Waddell's water/weight and Kambui Olujimi's The Clouds Are After Me, both deal with fantastic natural elements that serve as metaphors for harsher realities.
Waddell's artwork illustrates the story of a young girl who tries to escape from the bottom of the ocean. The exhibit consists of three parts, each a stage in the protagonist's journey.
First, large teardrops of collaged and burnt muslin feature tortured sentences such as "I am not the enemy," "I will never tell" and "I knew it all along." Waddell defies the traditional approach of simply painting the sentences; instead, she singed the letters through the fabric.
"I was trying to find some method of working that I felt articulated a lot of things I wanted to say about history, the landscape and my particular identity," she said. "When you burn something, you break it down and it becomes something else. It's a form of spiritualism and ritualism."
The next part, in which Waddell used her own hair to form a ladder, demonstrates the girl's attempt to escape.
"She shaves her head and builds this ladder," Waddell explained. "But it's still a futile attempt. It signals the sacrifices we have to make."
The exhibit finishes with a wall-sized piece called "Make Me a Sanctuary." The work shows an ocean comprised of strips of overlapping muslin and canvas, accented with other materials like pipe cleaners, fabric and glitter. This culmination focuses on water, for Waddell a representation of conflict and tension. She said she was inspired by recent floods, particularly those that followed Hurricane Katrina.
"[The water] represents a heavy shroud that's on top of us, a vast ocean that we have to fight through every day," Waddell said. "It's is a metaphor for a struggle that I think everybody at some point has to face."
She adds that although the art deals with a fictional story, it is still "hugely relevant whether you're in the [Durham] neighborhood or at Duke."
Brooklyn-based Olujimi's The Clouds Are After Me uses similar forces of nature to comment on the issue of crime in American society. The collection consists of a series of small paintings on vellum, a medium that appealed to him because of its fragility and imperfections.
"Vellum moves and becomes wavy-it's curved and buckled and warped," he said. "That's what I love about it."
The warped quality of the material complements the chaotic aspect of crimes. His paintings consist of "Wanted" and "Reward" posters with ominous, hovering clouds symbolizing the "antagonists." To Olujimi, clouds depict the uncertainty and doubt pervasive in our culture.
"No one really knows the true size or shape of a cloud," he explains. "It's an illusive invader. I tried to show that the fears, causes and answers [relating to crimes] are cloudy at best."
Even so, he added that it was difficult to fully explain the pieces, and he encouraged others to see the art themselves.
"Whatever you [are expecting], it probably won't look like that," Olujimi said.
The Clouds Are After Me and water/weight are on display through Oct. 25 at Branch Gallery, 401c Foster St. in Durham.
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