Bruno Nadalin & Leslie Erdman: “The Weight of Silence”
In a season filled with low-intensity scares and cheap thrills, a show dares to meet Hallowe'en on its own quaking territory.
Tonight the zombies will walk (and sing opera) in Hamilton Park. A block away at Ed & Mary’s, you can dress your dog in a monstrous outfit at a horror-themed puppy pageant. Rockers will crowd into the cemetery to commune with the Ghost of Uncle Joe’s. It’s that time of the year: we’re wallowing in Hallowe’en, and playing it for laughs and fun rather than chills.
But should you want to take the season seriously, the place to be, ironically, is one of the town’s cheeriest galleries. You are encouraged to direct yourself to IMUR (67 Greene St.) for “The Weight of Silence,” curator Ivy Huang’s most recent act of two-artist alchemy. This exhibition of whispers made visible pairs Bruno Nadalin of the JC Print Room (135 Erie St., on the fifth floor of Elevator JC) with fellow etcher Leslie Erdman, in town from Alexandria, Virginia. It’s an accretion of little hallucinations, many in black and white, some puzzling and some self-explanatory, and tiptoed trips into the shadows beyond the world we know.
“The Weight of Silence” isn’t necessarily scary. Neither is Hallowe’en. The holiday has its roots in Samhain, the pagan festival that commemorates the inauguration of the darkest days of the year and the brief permeability of the veil between the material realm and the spirit kingdom. If ghosts there are, Samhain is when we can expect to feel them. To some, the strangeness of Samhain is alien and terrifying; to others, a break from the monotony of rationality is positively (or negatively) liberating.
So what does the netherworld look like to Nadalin? The landscapes in his stark, unsettling prints are recognizable, but they’re also odd enough to put a shudder in our spines. Nadalin’s preferred figure is the minor devil — the workaday devil — horned, hunched, atomized, and as overwhelmed by his surrounding as any of us. These devils share our urban predicaments. They dwell in a shaded, sharp-angled, mysterious place of danger for mortals and spirits alike.
In Nadalin’s “Walking” prints and other devil-driven images, his characters are nearly swallowed by the sidewalk, dwarfed by the heavy night skies, and framed by big, flat, windowless walls covered with ominous graffiti. In one, a devil dutifully pushes a shopping cart on a deserted street while a slumped-shouldered observer peeks out from a high story. In another, a tiny devil comforts a childlike figure even smaller than he is as they pass a huge mural of skeletons and hollow-eyed monsters. Even the massive diabolical heads in “Devil City,” each the size of a tower block, seem too sessile to be malevolent. One devil in the background, long-nosed and bent forward, simply looks overburdened and sad.
Nadalin cleverly uses gradients to deepen the inverted feeling of life in the urban Underworld. The top floors of his buildings are often darker and gloomier than the grey area that fronts the road. Murky though the street may be, going up is no escape. In “Armory,” an etching with aquatint and drypoint, Nadalin’s lines cross, thicken, and intensify as the building climbs into the night. Neighboring towers appear to melt into the void. The only hint of color in this otherwise black and white piece is a tiny red door at the extreme lower left of the structure. It catches the eye, but it is not inviting. Nothing good is going on in there.
Should that portal swing open, we expect to find something similar to “Heads,” a print of bulbous bodies on a bar, contorted, reaching out, too close together for comfort, but too paralyzed with inertia to do anything about it. The piece is greatly dolorous, but there’s no suggestion of physical pain. Even the decapitated characters under the counter address the viewer with resignation.
The Pit, Nadalin seems to believe, is a place of cold repose. If there’s suffering in his “Hellscape,” it’s the agony of a long slow withering and wasting rather than a red hot poker. The disembodied heads in the etching confide in each other, coolly and diagnostically, as they hover above a repository of lost souls. A pair of blackened faces in the middle of the piece suggest that the fate of the judged and the judge are one and the same: swallowed, line by line, by fissures, cracks, and the great ink-wash of time.
Hungry canine faces leer out from the “Hellscape,” too. Animals have a place in Nadalin’s spectral city: the great “Bat” that glides over the brittle skyline; the leering beasts that gather, unsupervised, around a sickened stump in the “Dog Park;” the “Sugar Cat” that appears to dissolve before our eyes into a breathy mist. In the spectacular “Carousel,” a work of great visual extravagance from an artist who often keeps things tight, beasts, bipedal bugs, and blasted humans queue together in open corridors that lead toward a flaming castle in the shape of a head. There’s no jockeying for position, no pushing, no visible sign of discontent or revulsion at the differences between species. Instead, hundreds of individuals, some waving standards, trudge toward the archway-apertures built into the neck of the figure. Once inside this cosmic Great Adventure ride, will they be reincarnated? Consumed? Or are they destined to stalk this busy bardo indefinitely? One thing is for sure: there’s a powerful intimation of infinity in the etching. These characters, and maybe their viewers, have pushed beyond terror toward a mesmerizing alterity.
Nothing in Leslie Erdman’s half of “The Weight Of Silence” is quite so flamboyant. Her work is phantasmic nonetheless: indebted to Victorian-era storybooks and illustrations derived from laudanum-drugged Victorian-era reveries. If Nadalin’s work allows us to penetrate a hidden dimension, Erdman brings the ghost-world to us. Her human figures — and there are a lot of them — seem like translucent superimpositions on the scenes they inhabit, simultaneously there and not-there, present, but in some not-quite-fathomable way, untethered. Sometimes, as in “Still Here,” a study of an old apartment building and those who might have live there, we can see right through them. But even when we can’t, they never quite attain the opacity that would make them less uncanny.
In “Requiem,” we meet another drawing-room spirit. This one floats, a little bashfully, by an ornate door. She’s watched by a woman who stands in for the viewer; we don’t see her face, so we’re free to substitute our own. As any fan of stories about ghosts might expect, we can see straight through the spirit. The perceiver, who has slipped out of her shoes, might be becoming incorporeal, too. This could be a dramatization of longing, or a memory, or an actual visitation. Erdman, to her credit, doesn’t insist on a distinction. She knows that the line between what we long for and what haunts us is immaterial.
Other terrors and elevations are rendered with Pre-Raphaelite precision. In “My Eumenides,” a drypoint piece presented on paper, a drugged youth is accosted by furies who hang inches over his terrified face. “One Hundred Ghosts,” a tribute to the Japanese woodblock printmaker, shakes willowy, long-haired spirits out of the trees. In “The Last Phone Call,” a diagonal split-screen etched on zinc, we aren’t shown the eyes of a man saying goodbye; in the uncanny “Stranger on the Staircase,” our avatar watches a human spirit grab an ornate banister and slink toward a second-floor door in the gloom. In Erdman’s prints, humans are always coming or going, transient even when sitting still.
Neither artist evinces fear. Things unnatural are not to be run from or even avoided. They may be part of a parallel world — one that often feels near to us, even if we’re hazy on the specifics. Both Nadalin and Erdman imagine a spirit realm crowded with denizens and loaded with happenstance. They challenge us to reach through the veil and shake hands with the shades. That’s the seasonal message at its essence: the autumnal breeze that whistles through our unconscious, and keeps us awake at night.
(Bruno Nadalin and Leslie Erdman will be at JC Print Room today for a discussion and demonstration of their processes. They’ll be on the fifth floor of the Elevator building at 135 Erie Street. As for the show, it is, like many Hallowe’en spirits, only up for a short time. It closes on October 30. It’ll be viewable at IMUR on Thursday and Friday from 3 p.m. until 7 p.m. and on Saturday from 2 p.m. until 6 p.m. After that, it’ll be banished back to the netherworld from which it came, so get your haunting now.)
