Andrew Edwards
and Clayton Singleton
The Selden Gallery
Selden Arcade
Through February 12
For Clayton Singleton, this body of exhibited work turns on the theme of faith. Yet potential—the potential of children, of adults, of our new president—seems at least as much the point. Perhaps faith in potential comes closest to a conceptual umbrella for these paintings: faith that the dreams and promise within each of us will take flight.
Paper and toy airplanes symbolize that metaphorical flight in a variety of visually compelling ways that are recognizable but not redundant. They appear as a pattern across the sky or gripped in the hand of a young child. Other airborne symbols include doves, tossed mortar boards and horses that seemingly run like the wind.
Singleton also incorporates Adinkra symbols—a pictorial vocabulary that originated in Ghana, West Africa—in similarly inventive ways, frequently manipulating translucency, opacity and overlapping for symbolic and expressive purposes. In the exhibited pieces, Singleton favors especially the Nyame Nti fern-like symbol of faith and trust in God, and the Dwennimmen or “ram’s horns,” a symbol of humility combined with strength.
A trio of portraits entitled “Visionary Black Male,” features the symbols as a background pattern almost like wallpaper. Singleton overlays the beautifully painted faces with a different symbolic language: lines of authoritative-sounding English text that offer, in general, contrasting theories concerning the role of environment and culture as it pertains to personal responsibility and choice.
“After the Climb” depicts one of the artist’s Dream Kids who made their first appearance in Singleton’s second published book, Dream an Awesome Dream. The paper crown-wearing kids offer, not surprisingly, messages of hope and responsibility. Here a bright-eyed African-American boy in shorts and a T-shirt sits gleefully on his knees at the top of a yellow slide. Aligned with that painted illusion of a slide is a real yellow plastic slide that descends to the gallery floor, ending in a pile of sand.
Singleton’s palette is as sophisticatedly optimistic and similarly nuanced as his message. Working primarily in tones of gold, red, fuscia, blue, mint green and white, the key is high, but lots of underpainting, layering and contouring enrichens the colors and prevents the surfaces from appearing flat. His brushstrokes, which are evident but not distracting, enliven his surfaces and lace his overall realism with hints of expressionism. Though the forms may be realistically painted, their context is most often a symbolic construction well-suited to the delivery of his message.
AMERICANA: Edwards' "Caesar and Pontiac"
Andrew Edwards, on the other hand, is an American scene painter. Well, sort of. In his cool, clean-lined world of exaggerated deep space receding at eye level, the influence of film noir is both seen and felt. Through these meticulous acrylic paintings, he explores—with his tongue somewhat in his cheek—how seemingly normal American lives are intersected and mediated by the bizarre and by the vague threat of danger: a fire on a populated hillside, a train bearing down on an automobile or, more peculiarly, a glassy-eyed figure in a top hat and a ferocious tiger in a rusted-out car in a dark field near an amusement park
Improbable juxtapositions of ancient and modern references within a mid-century context are provocatively unsettling, as are the artist’s mask-wearing figures who interact normally with those around them. “Caesar and Pontiac” features Mom, Dad and the kids in the family station wagon driving past a forlorn town and cemetery into a bucolic landscape. However, Mom is wearing a bird mask and a small menagerie of creatures shares the back seats with the children. A somber sculptural bust of Julius Caesar stares with unseeing eyes from the bottom left. And the bare legs and midriff of a striped miniskirt-wearing woman appear about to float out of the scene at the top right like an untethered balloon.
Together, the paintings raise the question of whether there is any such thing as a normal American life. And they make you halfway hope there’s not. | 
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