At Kehler Liddell, Artists Dive Into Body And Spirit

The image appears to come apart at the seams in front of you. In one quadrant is a dancer, strong and in her element. But around her the image quick degrades. The colors break apart and crash into one. It’s just the sort of happy accident that some artists, like Kim Weston and JLS Gangwisch, seek out and exploit. ​“That image was a glitch. People thought we created it together but I thought it was perfect for this show. It’s where Jeffrey and I meet. There are no accidents. That image was supposed to be that way,” Weston said. ​“There’s such beauty in its technical disaster. Who says that’s not supposed to be there? Why isn’t my whole card destroyed? It was just that image. What energy source or force created that moment? And here, Jeffrey comes around and says he wants to do a show together.”

The show — ​“Cadence” — is running now at Kehler Liddell Gallery through Oct. 9.

Weston said that she wanted to do a show with Gangwisch early, as she saw the link between her work and theirs. ​“We’re both pushing the boundaries of photography, and I think those two juxtapositions really push it to another level of what photography can be, instead of what people expect it to be,” Weston said. ​“The new, new photography.”

Gangwisch appreciates Weston’s work as Weston appreciates theirs. ​“From the moment I became a member of this gallery I wanted to show with Kim Weston,” Gangwisch said. ​“She is a spiritual person. Her work is about the spirituality, and I am 100 percent areligious,” but ​“we’re dealing with fundamentally the same issues” — and ​“even though our work is conceptually and technologically different, we’re shooting at the same thing from different sides, and I just love it.” 

“We actually sought each other out,” Weston agreed. ​“If I show with anyone I want to show with Jeffrey.”

Gangwisch started off as a filmmaker and moved into making pieces of art ​“like a poet who realized they don’t have to write novels any more,” they said. With their background in video production, they based their artmaking in 3D scans of objects. As they honed their process, it allowed them to focus on exploring the idea of ​“the materiality of the human body” and ​“my own discomfort in the world,” they said. Gangwisch pulled from their own interaction with queer identity and politics; ​“I am a cishet man in my mind and body,” they said, ​“but I was raised in a queer family and am not perceived as a cishet man. I feel like I’m in a queer body and I’m very aloof and very effeminate, and culturally not at all male.” So ​“the idea of cultural versus biological gender has always been not something I get to choose whether I think about.” Their body, in short, ​“doesn’t one-to-one sync up with who I think I am,” they said. ​“It’s kind of a spirit versus body thing, but I’m an irreligious person, so I don’t tend to use that language.”

Gangwisch began by using animations to explore what that disconnection meant. They discovered that having a human figure in the mix, even in the abstract, made the piece ​“more charged, with life, with eroticism,” they said. While in graduate school at University of Maryland, Baltimore Count, they connected to the old Freudian idea of thanatos and eros — ​“we’re all getting busy reproducing, we’re all getting busy dying,” they said — and to the ideas of Czech surrealist animator Jan Švankmajer, in ​“deconstructing bodies” and still feeling the charge of eroticism.

Gangwisch is now an assistant professor of visual and performing arts at Albertus Magnus and continues to explore those ideas, using technology often associated with video games in the service of making art. Photos and videos of Gangwisch’s pieces don’t really capture what they’re up to. An array of tablets hooked up to cameras shows the viewer the gallery space they’re already in — and perhaps themselves — but altered, giving the viewer the sense of an entity that’s surveilling them, and in the process, changing them. Other prints, digitally rendered splashes of color, are actually exploded human forms.

Gangwisch’s part of the show culminates in three virtual reality headsets that each transform the gallery space for the viewer in a different way. In the first headset, the viewer can interact with a figure floating in the center of the gallery that somehow eludes your gaze. The second headset fills the gallery with virtual human figures, engaged in either an orgy or a massacre (the figures are featureless enough to be neither horrifically gory nor pornographic); it turns you into one of the figures as well. This reporter spent a number of minutes just staring at his own hands. Finally, the third headset radically changed the gallery into a space reminiscent of the root system of a tree, or a fungal network, with the viewer at the scale of an insect. It was disorienting, startling, and also quite soothing and beautiful.

Some of what Gangwisch is using in their art is familiar to those who play video games, which Gangwisch called ​“the most important art form of our lifetime. I think they have unparalleled cultural influence and cannot be overestimated or overcriticized.… I think that most of them are toxic and are absolutely hurting people’s brains. But there are also so many examples of video games” in which ​“you cannot achieve that emotion, you cannot get that influence over someone, without that game-ified point of interaction. So when it’s good, it’s amazing.”

But video game experience isn’t necessary for people to immerse themselves in Gangwisch’s pieces. ​“I am trying to make infinitely changing, infinitely patient, hypnogogic pieces that you could fall asleep with your eyes open looking at,” they said. When he’s in the gallery seeing people interact with his pieces, ​“watching that sense of exploration and wonder is the gratifying thing I can witness.”

As Gangwisch hinted, Weston’s own approach to art is in some ways the opposite of his, even as they ended up somewhere near the same place. Weston’s first photographs were ​“very abstract visually when I first started,” she said. She waited, using her camera to see ​“what spirits would present themselves.” But ​“over time I’ve been wanting to reveal more of the person and more of the spirit.”

Weston has been photographing dancers at powwows in the Northeast for years. For an artistic perspective, it’s a chance to create vibrant, kinetic images, to follow where the lens takes her. But her artistic practice has also represented a journey to connect with her own heritage, as a Black and Native woman. The images in Weston’s latest photographs are a step in her work; where before the faces were always blurred, the individuals unrecognizable, in the latest round of photographs — taken at the Shinnecock Indian Powwow on Long Island and the Schemitzun in Mashantucket — the individual dancers begin to emerge.

“It’s about the rhythm and the melody of the two forms coming together,” Weston said of the element of chance in her getting her images. She often feels that her photographs only ​“capture what they want me to see. I’m not taking. I’m sharing.… I feel almost I’m being given permission on share. It has taken time. I feel like my connection with spirit is that they’re trusting me and I can show you a little more. So more is being revealed. More of the spirit is showing, and more of the people.”

Weston, who graduated college in 1992, has been ​“going to the powwows since I was in my 20s, and my wife has been going since she was a kid,” Weston said. ​“Our kids have grown up at those two powwows.” The gatherings stopped during the pandemic; ​“the tribes closed down powwows.” But then ​“they started back last year. Some opened just for tribal members and some not at all. This year was the first year that a lot of the traditional ones we go to were back.”

Her artistic practice has developed hand in hand with her reclamation of her own personal and cultural past. ​“A lot of this was this search for my ancestry — being Black and being Native — and in my 20s really talking to my parents and my grandfather,” she said. ​“Our grandmother taught me medicines and healing properties with different herbs and plants.” Recently her brother began sharing everything he knows about the family history (when Weston pressed him on why he didn’t talk sooner, he told her ​“you didn’t ask the right questions,” Weston related with a laugh).

“We never really talked about it because of the fear. You were taught not to be proud of your Native ancestry. You were taught that if you talked about it you would be taken away,” Weston continued. Now ​“we share all these stories. It’s refreshing to have it because it’s an oral tradition.” She has learned about how her people, Mohawk and Cherokee, moved from place to place, traveling, trading, looking for work. 

“People act like Native people didn’t move, like they only stayed with their own tribe, and that’s not true,” Weston said. ​“We’re not a people who stayed in one particular place.”

As Weston has learned more about her past, she has understood her role in passing it on, as both an artist and a participant in her culture. ​“I feel like it’s a teaching moment, a moment for sharing and exposure. As traditions are passed down, they are added to. People think that traditions are just old stuff, but each generation creates new traditions. My generation creates new traditions. My children will create new traditions. It’s important that we tell the stories of our grandparents, but also that our children tell our stories.” 

Her photographs, to her, are part of that. ​“My great-grandchildren will be able to see this work,” she said. ​“That’s really important, that it’s my voice. That it’s the voice of a Black, Native woman, that those Native traditions are there. That I’m a woman. I have a female gaze on my culture, and that alone speaks volumes as to how I’m presenting my people. When you look at my images, there’s a nurturing about them, a weaving of peace and love in the way those colors intertwine with one another, and how I frame those dancers and that energy.”

Part of her slow process of opening up her photographs, revealing the individual identities of dancers, is about confronting the fraught history of taking pictures of Indigenous Americans. In the late 1800s, photographer Edward Curtis was ​“running across America trying to capture people who were being slaughtered,” Weston said. ​“It was genocide.” In her understanding, Curtis wanted to ​“save what he thought was a visual culture, the visual identity of tribes, because he knew they were being killed.”

Today, the generational scars are still very much there, though also, as Weston pointed out, ​“we’re over 500 tribes strong, and I have a voice from my female gaze that wants to tell my story” — and talk about ​“the love and the peace and the joy of how our ancestors speak to us, how they continue to walk with us.”

The sense of sharing increasingly extends to those who see her images, whoever they are. ​“My relationship with my people and my culture that I’m able to share with you — it’s my hope that you’re able to take what I experience and say, ​‘this is what It’s like to be at a powwow.’ It’s a sacred space. It’s more than the colors and the regalia. The colors are exciting, of course. But why, all of a sudden, in that triptych in the gallery — they’re taken one second apart do you have a figure that looks happy, and then not happy, and then there’s a horse? I want to be able to open that up to you — how quickly that energy changed in just three seconds. It is open for you to be able to see and share, and hopefully you get it, that it’s not just about the traditional dancer and his eagle feathers,” she said. ​“It’s spiritual. It’s about more than just being Native.”

For starters, it’s about drawing attention to ​“missing, murdered Indigenous sisters,” Weston said. Part of that idea came out of a conversation Weston had with a Taino dancer a couple months ago. ​“Every time I took her picture, her image would split,” Weston said. ​“We were kind of looking for each other and we started talking.”

“Every picture I have of you, your spirit is split,” Weston recalled saying. ​“Well, I have a lot going on, but it’s really important that I get this message across,” the dancer said. ​“Our sisters need to be found.”

On another front, Weston is also close to officially opening Wábi Gallery, an enterprise on Court Street that represents artists and mentor and train high school students. In its fellowship program, students learn ​“how to sustain themselves as artists and commercially,” Weston said. The program had seven students last year, three of whom went off to college. ​“That was really nice to see, and I was able to give away equipment to each one of the students — cameras and lenses.”

The next fellowship program starts in October (applications open now). When the space is fully open, Weston also imagines it being a work-sharing spot. ​“I want it to be an active space. I don’t want it to be a traditional space where you walk in and people tell you to be quiet. I want workshops, talks, community events. I want to give artists who are just starting out to have the ability to show their work,” Weston said. ​“I have some really great people supporting me in the community. It’s on its way. But I’m most excited about the educational programming I’m going to be able to do.… Hopefully A&I and Wábi Gallery will be able to create a program for A&I and beyond.” She also envisions collaborations with the Arts Council, Creative Arts Workshop, and Artspace — ​“we’ll all be able to work together” and get ​“these young artists’ faces out there, so they can actually make money, and not just show their art. New Haven is known for loving art, but let’s purchase something, people!”

But Weston is humble about all her endeavors, still willing to follow questions and intuitions where they lead. ​“I’m just a vessel and I hold the camera, and my ancestors play in front of me, and dance in front of me, and teach,” she said of her photography. ​“My camera is a tool that allows me to capture that and share it.”

“Cadence” runs at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through Oct. 8. Visit the gallery’s website for more information.