The sculpture "In Plain Sight," created by Girls for a Change for InLight 2019, held at Chimborazo Park. Visit 1708gallery.org for a guide to this year's show, Nov. 12-15, in multiple locations. (Photo by David Hale courtesy 1708 Gallery)
The 1708 Gallery’s annual exhibition of contemporary light-based artworks, InLight, has confronted unforeseen obstacles since its Sept. 5, 2008, premiere along Broad Street.
In its first year, a downpour delayed the march of the Wearable Art competition, but the rains eventually halted as though someone pulled a lever. Since then, the show has gone on, despite cold, wet and frustrating vagaries of logistics and technology.
And now, there’s a pandemic.
The 13th annual exhibition will proceed as planned Nov. 12-15, with a theme of “Safety and Accountability” and with installations spread throughout the city, instead of in one location as in years past, to limit crowd size.
For this year’s exhibition, 1708 curator Park Myers and InLight co-curator Wesley Taylor, an assistant professor at VCU, selected pieces they felt were suited to the present predicament, addressing both a worldwide plague and societal and racial division. The chosen works also needed to respond to their physical locations.
The curators stressed community outreach, with the participation of civic groups, youth collectives and the stewards of particular venues.
Some of the installations are designed to be appreciated by viewers from their cars, while others invite pedestrians to gaze upon them. In the case of one installation, keeping with the event’s sense of whimsy and invention, when you can’t get to InLight, InLight will come to you — on a bicycle.
Richmond artist Barry O’Keefe’s “Mobile Projection Booth,” in partnership with the James River Park System, is true to its title. At various points on and near the T. Tyler Potterfield Memorial Bridge, O’Keefe’s bike-trailer fabrication will function as a nomadic lighthouse/public service announcement highlighting climate change and ecological crisis. The message, as though expressed by a fictional city department, is conveyed through old audio recordings of scientific information and poetry and shadow puppetry.
“No Safety Here,” by artists Muthi Reed and Sage Crump, springs from the chant of Civil War-era abolitionists: “Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe.” Exhibition-goers will encounter the multimedia interactive piece at a point along the river where enslaved persons disembarked. The gallery describes “No Safety Here” as a “spiritual, emotional, economic and devotional experiences of Blackness across time, geographies and space.”
In another installation, the windows of a former Sunday school building adjacent to the church presently occupied by Oakwood Arts at 35th and P streets in the Oakwood-Chimborazo Historic District will become the presentation space for Oakwood artist-in-residence Stephanie Woods and her installation titled “The Wait of It.”
The five-part moving photograph installation builds on Laura Neal’s poem “Bleached,” which was written in response to a prior installation by Woods. The title refers to the nine years Woods spent growing and collecting her hair, as well as “the psychological weight of being Black in America and the politicization of afro hair.”
Myers explains, “We’re not trying to give all the solutions and resolutions for this particular moment of history, but provide a platform for audiences and artists to express what safety and accountability mean in this day and time.”
