In keeping with its name, the Forward Arts Foundation invests in the future with an annual award to a talented Atlanta artist who has had no major solo show and is not connected with a commercial gallery. The prize is $10,000 and a solo show at the Swan Coach House Gallery, which it operates.
Cosmo Whyte, the 2009-10 winner, is a very good choice. If you saw his delicate, haunting drawings at Agnes Scott College’s Dalton Gallery or at Marcia Wood Gallery in past years, you probably remember them. The Jamaica-born artist, 28, has approached the solo show as an opportunity to show what else he can do. In addition to the intimate graphite drawings, “The Morning Passage” includes super-sized color photos as well as mixed-media works that make deft use of cut-paper, collage and glitter.
Masculinity, memory and ancestry are themes Whyte explores here. He links pieces of varied scales and materials through the repetition of two main motifs. One is a boat. The other is an African-American male wrapped in a plethora of men’s ties.
Both are ambiguous. On one hand, the dread-locked figure -- sometimes in a business suit, sometimes naked -- is blinded or constrained by the ties, perhaps an allusion to male responsibility, or, as Whyte has suggested, a more sophisticated form of Western bondage. On the other, the ties’ profusion of color and pattern brings to mind the glories of African textiles and the adornment of African sculpture (one of the photos is titled Nkisi).
Similarly, the boat is a positive symbol of journey--physical, mental and spiritual—and a reference to slavery and the Middle Passage.
Ambiguity can make for a rich experience, but sometimes you just can’t have it both ways. Sometimes Whyte asks his symbols to do too much. How can the ties, with their obvious constraining force, also symbolize the African divining rods to which he makes reference?
I would say that Whyte dwells more on the dark side of the spectrum. In “HighTide,” a striking, two-part mixed media drawing, the journey does not end well. He depicts an empty boat floating above the bodies of his Everyman figure, which lie on the ocean floor.
“High Tide” demonstrates his technical panache. Painted a rich black, the boat is a cut-out affixed to the paper, which gives it the slightest pop. Whyte imaginatively suggests the sea using white paper cut in intricate patterns, which curl off the sheet like rolling whitecaps. The charcoal figures represent his facile draftsmanship.
The photos are the weak link. Perhaps intended to give a gloss of conceptual sophistication, these rather generic pieces do not add anything to theme of male identity, an ongoing preoccupation of African-American artists, among them Fahamu Pecou and Hank Willis Thomas.
Further, they only serve to attenuate the exhibit’s emotional impact. Not that an artist has to go for the gut, as Stephen Hayes does with similar imagery in his installation at Mason Murer Fine Art. Whyte’s small drawings are quiet but touch the soul. The large drawings are visually effective, but line for line those intimate pieces are his strongest suit.
Catherine Fox is chief visual art critic for ArtsCriticATL.com.
Exhibit review
Cosmo Whyte
“The Morning Passage: New Works by Cosmo Whyte”
Through Aug. 7. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. Swan Coach House Gallery. 3130 Slaton Drive. 404-266-2636. www.swancoachhouse.com
Artist's talk. 11 a.m. July 24.
The bottom line: A promising artist shows off his technical chops in an ambitious, if uneven, solo show.
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