BAM’s Next Wave Art Showcases Artists Across Disciplines

Also open through December 20 is BAM’s Next Wave Art, the visual component of the festival that opened on October 3. The majority of the works are on display in the lobby of the Howard Gilman Opera House and the adjoining Leonard Natman Room, but the exhibition also spills over into the BAMcafé, the BAMcafé Gallery, and the BAM Harvey Theater. The festival’s featured art includes a video installation, sculpture, graphite drawings, and oil paintings.

 

The mission of the Next Wave Festival, now in its 27th season, is to showcase some of Brooklyn’s most innovative emerging artists from across disciplines (dance, music, theater and film) and mediums. The Next Wave Art section of the festival, only in its eighth year, has become an integral part of BAM’s larger program. Organizers of the visual art component write that it is meant to stimulate “a vital dialogue between performing and visual arts.” It is also intended to give voice to artists who show “a tendency towards experiment [and who employ] alternative spaces and media.”  

 

“I don’t know if one could pinpoint a single overarching theme to the exhibition—we like to think of it more as a cross-section of the most exciting new work being produced by artists who live and work in Brooklyn,” says Dave Harper, one of the exhibit curators.

 

The first thing that catches the eye upon entering BAM’s opera house on Lafayette Avenue is a large mixed media sculpture with honeycomb-like structures filled in with subdued colors, conveying an impression of an oversized makeshift painter’s palette. The sculpture, positioned in the center of the opera house lobby, has a presence comparable to a complete, no-bones-missing dinosaur skeleton in a natural history museum.

 

The artist, Diana Al Hadid, makes an average of four or five sculptures a year, depending on their sizes. “Quite often one piece may take five months and stay with me in the studio before and after other work is made,” she said.

 

“As far as how a work moves from conception to completion . . . I do begin with a general plan or ‘vision’—sometimes, in fact, it is painfully detailed,” added Ms. Hadid. “But I can never stick to the original story. I often have a slightly stronger sense about ‘how’ rather than ‘what’ will be made.  I almost never know everything about my work, but I do begin with a clue and begin investigating.  Almost always my work fails to look like my initial conception, mostly because that initial conception was impossible in the first place.  In the course of making the thing, I slowly realize the first idea was complete fiction. While that sounds disappointing, it’s actually interesting to discover how delusional my intentions were and how desperately I held onto that fiction until the bitter failed end.  I have gotten used to this and often build in deliberate blind spots in the process to allow for chance and flexibility.  It wouldn’t be much fun if I already knew what it would be. I’d have no urgency or incentive.” 

 

While Ms. Hadid’s intentions may be delusional, her work is undeniably real. On the evening of the exhibition’s opening reception in October, awed visitors circled around it, stepped away from it, and moved close to it once again—the desire to touch almost palpable.

 

The work of Paolo Arao, another of BAM’s featured visual artists, is a perfect embodiment of the festival’s objective—connecting often dissimilar forms of art. “Make Them Love You,” a series of graphite drawings whose source images are found photographs, draws on Mr. Arao’s musical background. “I play the piano and I studied performance and music composition in school before switching over to fine art,” he said. “I was (and still am) a musician before I became a visual artist.” The main characters in the drawings in this series are microphones—but despite their status as technically inanimate objects, they take on explicitly human qualities. The power Mr. Arao infuses into these objects is what makes the series so gripping, especially for the music lovers in us all.

 

“The microphone drawings function like portraits,” said the artist. Though a performer/speaker is physically absent, a strong presence remains. When I first started this series I thought of the microphones as metaphors for power and also for the desire to be loved. Now, these microphone drawings function on so many other levels, both personal and social. On the blank space of the page, the microphones resemble characters that stand, bow, hover or search longingly for a voice.”

 

On a wall adjacent to Paolo Arao’s work in the Leonard Natman Room are a set of intricate and intimately captivating paintings by Echo Eggebrecht (top image). The size of the images—most are approximately the size of an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper—coupled with an astonishing attention to detail is what immediately draws the viewer in. Her aesthetic, while on the one hand minimalist, also incorporates minutae such as, in “Painting for Don DeLillo,” a finely detailed Persian rug. The painting is a reaction to 9/11 conspiracy theories and incorporates ideas from DeLillo’s 1988 novel Libra. “The writing on the wall in that painting was information I found detailing the conspiracy theories around flight times, patterns and the flow of information generated on the morning of 9/11,” said the artist.

 

“Happiness is not based on oneself, it does not consist of a small home, of taking and getting. Happiness is taking part in the struggle, where there is no line between one’s own personal world, and the world in general,” continued Ms. Eggebrecht, quoting a character from Libra to describe her painting.

 

“Most of my work has a dialogue with a personal relationship to history, or an individual’s relationship to history, or addresses the idea that one person can have a benign thought that can be twisted into something dark and extreme, and create this moment that becomes a part of everyone’s life. That domino effect,” said the artist. “The DeLillo painting is about seeing something through to it’s completion, as it takes on a life of it’s own and becomes something else entirely. And ultimately, being responsible for the thing it becomes.”