The new, three-artist exhibit at Union Hall, titled “Biyáál,” comes off less as a group show and more as a single piece of immersive art created by a trio of minds working
together. The effort — atmospheric, elegant, spiritual and enlightening — is intriguing at every turn.
Credit curator Esther Hernandez for putting together such a cohesive exhibit, not an easy task considering that each artist works in a distinct form of traditional or contemporary art that rarely overlaps in a serious gallery. Materially, they have almost nothing in common.
- Randall Beyale updates an ancient tradition of carving human-like forms out of alabaster, the soft, sometimes-translucent rock found frequently in Colorado. He is a sculptor.
- Wayne Beyale is a painter who uses acrylic on canvas, as well as pastel on paper, to make representational works depicting scenes that range from landscape to portrait.
- JayCee Beyale is a wide-ranging contemporary artist who switches freely between media and method. He contributes to this show three-dimensional sculptures that hang from the ceiling; projections beamed onto the walls; and painstakingly-produced, highly-patterned sand paintings that he installed directly on the gallery floors.
The cohesion between the works is certainly helped by the fact that the artists are family. JaycCee, who has the most works in the show, is a cousin to Wayne. Randall is his uncle. Each is a member of the indigenous Diné (Navajo) tribe.
And all of their work in this show is themed around traditional healing traditions, specifically the Nightway Ceremony, a seven-day community ritual that “includes chants, dances and the creation of ceremonial regalia and sand paintings,” as it is explained in the curatorial text.
The Nightway Ceremony takes place when a person or a family faces some difficulty and seeks physical or emotional relief. Traditionally, the rituals take place in the fall and winter.
That seasonal feel is embodied in Union Hall itself. The gallery lighting is kept intentionally dim, reflecting a time of year when days are short and families across cultures tend to come together in both spiritual and celebratory ways. It is a nighttime setting to explore rituals that happen in the dark.
But rather than seeing the actual ritual, visitors see these artists doing their own interpretation of how it unfolds and what it means to them individually, and what they want others to understand about it. They take this old practice and move it forward in a new language.
All of the work in the show is abstract in its way, though Randall’s is the most literal. His carvings take the form of characters that play a part in Diné lore. One example: “Corn Maiden,” a 2-foot-tall carving of a female figure wrapped in jewels and a blanket-like garment. Visible in the front of her alabaster body is a corn stalk growing tall and reaching toward the sky.
Wayne’s paintings are more contemporary, reflecting a style of painting that is rooted — at least visually and from a European perspective — in 20th-century modernism. There is a reductive, abstract geometric style in his “Cosmic Warriors,” depicting a trio of beings hovering in what appears to be a deep-blue, constellation-filled sky.
The painting has an obvious symmetry and an underlying rhythm, traits that also come across in his pastel work “Yei Warriors.” In the actual Nightway ceremony, dancers embody both of these warrior spirits as a way of bringing blessings to the participants.
Both Randall’s carvings and Wayne’s paintings lay an art-history groundwork for JayCee, who is very much an artist of the moment, rejecting easy labels like sculptor or painter and instead indulging in a variety of media to make his points.
For example, his “Atsiniltlish (Lightning)” is made of cedar boards connected together to make a zig-zag shape that stretches 10 feet across a gallery wall. It is backlit with blue LED lights, and dangling from its lower edge is a fringe constructed from jingle cones, the percussion-based instruments used during Diné ceremonies.
JayCee makes a high-tech move with his “Nishłį (I am),” a work projected on the wall that overlays moving images of the rocky lands found here in the Western United States over images of the sky and stars. The projections are aimed at a series of wood panels that reference Spiderwoman, a common character in Diné origin stories.
“By merging digital projection with natural imagery, ‘Nishłį’ bridges traditional knowledge and contemporary technology, reflecting the exhibition’s larger dialogue between ancestral knowledge and modern expression,” Hernandez explains in her statement.
Somewhere in the middle of the historical and cultural stories that this exhibit wants to tell are JayCee’s sand paintings, all done over several days on-site and all nearly perfect in their fine lines and divisions of colors, and all rendered in exacting symmetry.
They take a traditional, circular form, and they reference traditional elements of Diné life and belief systems. One work depicts fire and air, with images of plants and candles clearly visible. The other depicts water and earth through imagery that appears as feathers or corn.
But characterizing the sand paintings as “traditional” is a challenge because these works, instead of being completed during an actual Nightway Ceremony or on native lands, were made in a gallery and presented as fine art. So, are they artworks or are they genuine tools of ritual?
And it is exactly that question — what is it? — that makes the whole of “Biyáál” so intriguing. Certainly, it is an art exhibit, and if you were to consider the works in the show individually, you would easily see this is a collection of easy-to-define objects, in particular, paintings, sculptures and installations. We see those all the time.
But together, they emerge as something greater. Partly, the show is a documentary in the way it serves as a historical record of Native American traditions. Partly, it is an educational tool in the way that it brings new information to folks who are not steeped in Diné tradition. And, it must be said, the exhibit also provides entertainment — it is a showy, colorful, surprising spectacle that almost looks as if were lit for the stage.
But it also serves as important testimony to the perseverance of Diné life, because we know these artists are related and that they cross generations. They are exposing family traditions that were invented long before they came along, and they are doing everything they can to make sure they are valued into the future.
This trio may express themselves in different artistic languages, but their message of self-affirmation and reinforcement of deeply held beliefs is the same. Their three voices speak as one.
IF YOU GO
“Biyáál” continues through Jan. 3 at Union Hall, located inside The Coloradan building at 1750 Wewatta St. It’s free. Info: 720-927-4033 or unionhalldenver.org.