Project: Blooming in the Whirlwind at Durden and Ray
Curators: Arezoo Bharthania, Sean Noyce, and Ismael de Anda III
Exhibiting artists: Arezoo Bharthania, Ismael de Anda III, Dani Dodge, Kiyomi Fukui, Sean Noyce, Tina Linville, Reed Van Brunschot, Flora Kao, and Ricardo Harris-Fuentes
On view: Nov. 13 to Dec. 5, 2021
Swirling in the chaos and tragedy of the pandemic have been swift currents of creativity and collaboration. Blooming in the Whirlwind, Nov. 13 to Dec. 5, 2021 at Durden and Ray is a brilliant example of how creativity could not be contained by lockdowns and masking restrictions.
It started with poems, that inspired films, that, ultimately, inspired visual art installations. A collaboration of the Level Ground and Durden and Ray collectives, this is the first gallery show to display this series of transformations.
“The Level Ground Collective started this process at the beginning of the pandemic by inviting poets and then pairing their works with filmmakers,” said Durden and Ray curator/artist Arezoo Bharthania. “Durden and Ray sought to give this process a grand closure. In this final visual transformation, the curators matched installation artists to each film.”
Blooming in the Whirlwind takes its name from a line found in the poet Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1968 classic, “The Second Sermon on the Warpland.” Writing in 1968—another year of upheaval and tragedy in America—Brooks encouraged readers to “conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”
At the Durden and Ray gallery, the poems will be in booklets that visitors can take with them, the videos will be displayed on a wall monitor, and the installations can be explored throughout the gallery.
“Each of the artists has reflected a moment of the pandemic with their creativity that inspired another work in a different moment,” Bharthania said. “This gallery show puts these moments and transformations together at the perfect time, the time we ourselves are transforming into a new pandemic/post-pandemic world.”
At the start, Level Ground curators Samantha Curley and Andy Motz chose poets to write about the moment. They then paired each selected poem with a filmmaker or filmmaking duo. Through a dynamic process of active dialogue and mutual cooperation the filmmakers then created a two- to five-minute short film that offers a visual reflection of the source poem. The works fulfill Level Ground’s mission of producing creative collaboration within and across different artistic mediums.
Then, Durden and Ray artist/curators, Arezoo Bharthania, Ismael de Anda III, and Sean Noyce, invited nine visual artists to pair their artwork with the nine poem-films pairings. The visual artists were challenged to create art installations that echo of a voice from within their assigned film or to allow that film to inspire a fresh or distinct perspective from their particular point of view.
In her poem, Christina Brown writes:
there is no grow no progress no
unpeel or bloom without a rear view
mirror a burden of bloodline or consequence …
This exhibition explores the growth, the bloom, and the consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic in a unique and moving way through three different forms of art created in three different points of time. And through this process it proves, there can be blooming in a whirlwind.