By LAWRENCE COSENTINO
Friday afternoon (Feb. 2), the LookOut! Gallery, a cozy room tucked into the second floor of Michigan State University’s Snyder-Phillips Hall, was bursting at the seams with more than 70 people.
East Lansing artist Elijah Hamilton-Wray circulated through the gallery, greeting friends and fellow art enthusiasts. People shot glances at his face, then again at the art.
Their expressions seemed to say, “Yes, it’s the same guy.”
In a series of striking self-portraits, Hamilton-Wray lovingly painted his own severed head, with a very surprised expression, in various grim settings — on a pike, at the end of a rope and so on.
Some people laughed. Some people gulped with discomfort. Others did both at once.
In the other wing of the gallery, visitors drifted past inky clouds of hair that billowed to the ceiling, curled around corners and stretched in all directions. On the walls, hundreds of tiny figures danced, exulted, dangled and lolled in the tumbling hair. Artist Samantha Modder escorted visitors through her epic sequence of drawings, a waking dream that sprang from pandemic isolation.
The gallery isn’t easy to find, but by 6 p.m., it was packed with students, faculty and curious art lovers. MSU Broad Art Museum interim director Steven Bridges stopped by to check out the art and declared it “amazing.”
Modder, 28, and Hamilton-Wray, 29, have partnered to present “Sam x Elijah: Making Space x Taking Space,” the latest in a long string of provocative, engaging LookOut! Gallery exhibits that stretch back to 2012. Modder takes the viewer on a ride through her imagination, where socks stretch for yards and hair takes on a life of its own. Hamilton-Wray does extreme violence to his own visage to pull the viewer through the window of traditional portraiture and into the other side.
‘A ballpoint pen is my home’
Modder’s epic, wall-sized images at the LookOut! Gallery begin with a fairy tale written on the gallery wall: “On a dull Monday in Massachusetts, a Black woman awoke to find she had grown a person out of her hair.”
“This has been an obsession of mine since 2020,” Modder explained. “It started at the beginning of the pandemic, when I was living alone in Salem, Massachusetts, and spending a lot of time by myself, as a lot of us were.”
Born in Nigeria and raised in Sri Lanka, Modder graduated from New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College in 2017 with dual degrees in studio art and engineering. She lives in Florida and teaches art at the University of Tampa.
The isolation of the pandemic reminded her of hours spent reading fairy tales and fantasies as a child.
Her work at the LookOut! is flavored with many such flights of fancy, from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” to the tales of Dr. Seuss to “Gulliver’s Travels.”
“We were all looking for ways to escape, and I find a lot of comfort in drawing,” she said. “A ballpoint pen is my home, in a sense. It’s what I reach for.”
Modder said that in her large-scale drawings, she wanted to recreate the wonder of childhood stories that “tower over you, make you feel small.”
In Modder’s narrative, the hair invites the woman to “go away” to a place “made up of just you and all you bring in.”
“This character is alone in this world, just her,” Modder explained. “Her nightdress, her socks, her hair. And it becomes an allegory for all the things I’m processing about the world around me.”
Her character is ready for a solitary adventure. “Between a pandemic, a burning planet, and her pilates instructor learning that racism was still a thing, (she) was so done with other people,” the narrative goes.
That’s about as specific as Modder gets when describing her art. She wants viewers to interpret it in their own ways.
“What was my hair trying to tell me? That’s the dream that’s been going on for almost four years now,” she told visitors at Friday’s reception. “It’s a lot of self-portraiture. If everyone else in the world disappeared and it was just me, would I do any better? The answer, so far, is…”
About 20 people leaned forward to catch the next word.
“…ongoing.”
Adding a twist
Jeff Wray, a film studies professor, screenwriter and filmmaker, is always looking for ways to spread the word about the arts.
In 2021, Wray was named MSU’s Timnick Chair in the Humanities, with a sweeping mission to, in his words, “connect the dots between different aspects of the humanities.”
“I’m a filmmaker, but I love art — painting, drawing, music, all of it — and a big part of our mission is to support emerging artists,” Wray said.
He first saw Modder’s work two years ago at a Midwest conference of Black artists, and he’s been looking for a way to showcase it ever since.
To find a perfect complement to Modder’s work, Wray didn’t have to look far. Hamilton-Wray is his son. Jeff has been following Elijah’s development closely, from his early interest in comic book heroes to Friday’s big reception.
The work on display at the LookOut! was still a surprise to him.
“I hear a little bit about it as he’s doing it, then when I see it finalized, it feels brand new to me,” Wray said.
“So, in that way, seeing Sam’s work and seeing Elijah’s final work was the same thing to me — young Black artists who are doing very compelling work.”
Hamilton-Wray started out as an avid fan of comic book heroes like Spider-Man and the Avengers. In grade school, he and five of his friends created an “Avengers”-style superhero comic in which they each had a superpower.
His superpower was ostensibly time travel, but it was really his ability to get the comic done.
“I ended up doing most of the work,” he admitted.
Before long, he began painting portraits of his family and friends. He called portraiture the “most accessible” of art forms.
“We all know people and interact with people every day,” he said.
When he took the bold step of blending portraiture with surrealism, Hamilton-Wray was partly inspired by Salvador Dali. But he also admires the epic, color-saturated work of Kehinde Wiley, who painted former President Barack Obama’s official portrait, and Kerry James Marshall, a celebrated Black artist whose paintings, sculptures and comic strips explode with vivid images of Black life.
“I love their attention to detail,” he said. “They approach their craft with a delicacy that makes the viewing experience thought-provoking and impressive.”
Hamilton-Wray’s mysterious faces and quizzical, bloody heads pop with a distinctive, self-revealing energy Black artists have tapped into for decades that’s lighting up many galleries in the 21st century.
Marshall defined that energy as a “tendency toward the theatrical,” a strong sense of style “that seems to be so integral, a part of the Black cultural body.”
Hamilton-Wray has concentrated on art since he got his master of fine arts in 2019 from Northern Vermont University in Johnson, Vermont. The portraits in the LookOut! show were made with acrylics and oils, his main mediums, but he also creates watercolors, prints and drawings.
Portraiture is still his bread and butter, but the self-portraits in the LookOut! exhibit have a lot more than that going on.
“I wanted to stretch what a self-portrait means to me,” he said. “I added a twist.”
He paused to relish the understatement.
“I removed my own head and put it in all these weird and strange positions, with all these facial expressions you wouldn’t expect to see in that sort of situation.”
In “Headrest,” his head is planted at the point of a long spear. He was inspired, in part, by fantasy stories in which a brutal warlord demands the heads of his enemies, skewered on a pike.
However, the shocked expression on Hamilton-Wray’s face in “Headrest” is more suited to a man whose phone just went down the toilet than a defeated enemy of Genghis Khan.
“I thought about what it would look like if I were to die in this brutal way, and how could I make it humorous,” he explained. He added a dry laugh.
Another entry in the “Heads” series depicts a white hand grabbing Hamilton-Wray’s hair.
The artist acknowledged the portrait’s racial charge, but he said it’s also a reaction to people walking up to him and touching his hair.
Another portrait series, “Faces,” takes a reductionist approach. The self-portraits are reduced to a few fully rendered features — a hat, a pair of glasses, a mask, a floating eyeball — with the rest of the space left blank.
The paintings are more, and less, than portraits. They are voids. They are puzzles. They are mirrors.
“I tried to see what the viewer brings to the paintings — what they’ll assume about someone based on these minimal features,” Hamilton-Wray said. “Ultimately, I want the viewer to think about their own individuality and what shapes who they are.”
Floating together
The LookOut! Gallery is shaped like a butterfly, with one wing devoted to each artist in the current exhibit. In the center is a glassy atrium where both artists’ work surges upward on vertical columns — the thorax of the gallery.
“This is my favorite space,” Wray said. “They’re kind of floating together here.”
Resplendent in striped socks and an air of wonderment, Modder’s imaginary Black woman rides on great flying balls of hair, with Hamilton-Wray’s severed heads dangling in between.
Here, the two artists’ contrasting styles merge to create a joyous, violent, funny, defiant fantasia of Black hair, Black bodies and Black faces.
“There’s something really powerful about the imaginary, about the Black imaginary, and what it means to create these powerful, comforting but sometimes confrontational stories,” Modder said.
Hair, in the form of filaments, clouds, braids, lifelines, sunbursts and entire worlds, is a strong presence in both artists’ work.
“Black hair is, and has been, a loaded symbol in this country, in terms of being dismissed and frowned upon,” Wray said. “Here we have these two painters celebrating all different forms of Black hair and making it magical.”
While the two artists were setting up the exhibit, Modder gently chided Hamilton-Wray.
“All you have to do is hang up your paintings,” she told him.
Modder designed her wall-sized ink drawings to fit each of the gallery walls within fractions of an inch. Months before the exhibit opened, she asked gallery preparator Steve Baibak for pictures of the quirky space and exact dimensions of its walls, angles and cubbyholes.
“She was very professional to work with,” Baibak said.
It didn’t hurt that Modder is also a trained mechanical design engineer. Although she presently concentrates on art and teaching, Modder spent some years working with a nonprofit to develop construction methods and materials for low-resource areas like Haiti. (She also devised an improved form of penile implants for men with erectile dysfunction and invented Fly Free, a magnetic clip that keeps bicyclists’ skirts from blowing upward.)
In keeping with Baibak’s vision of the LookOut! Gallery as an informal learning space, Modder worked with students to complete the complex installation. Although its imaginative shows are raising its profile in the community, teaching is still the core mission of the gallery, which is a part of MSU’s Residential College in the Arts and Humanities.
“It’s fantastic when an artist works alongside students,” Baibak said. “They experience it right with the artist.”
Baibak co-organized the current two-person exhibit alongside Tama Lynne Hamilton-Wray, an assistant professor of Africana film studies at the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities.
Baibak is a good man to know. He is not only an inventive artist and dedicated teacher; he’s also the keeper of the vault of weird and wonderful artifacts that lurk in the hallways and corners of the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, including treasures culled from previous art exhibits.
In all, Baibak has installed 78 exhibits since he came to MSU. If you’re nice to him, he’ll take you on an informal tour through the halls, a gallery-within-the-gallery that’s crammed with dozens of diverse artistic gems — so much that there’s even art hanging in the break room, over the microwave.
One of the most spectacular works is a beautiful, poster-sized birch-bark sign by artist Dylan Miner from a 2016 protest against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. There are also works by California artist Favianna Rodriguez, Lansing artist Bruce Thayer and New York City artist Bradly Dever Treadaway.
Art exhibits at the LookOut! have often been wild and unpredictable. Baibak smiled at the memory of Treadaway and Italy-based artist Justin Randolph Thompson making a beeline for the MSU Surplus Store as soon as they arrived in 2015 to install a frantic multimedia exhibit, “Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics.”
“They were like, ‘Oh, you have a surplus store?’” Baibak recalled. “They spent the whole night in the gallery installing their own work. It was phenomenal — stuff hanging everywhere, they had fans blowing stuff. I still think about that show a lot.”
When the World War I drama “War Horse” came to the Wharton Center in 2012, community members were invited to build life-sized horse puppets inspired by the props used in the play. Baibak raided the Surplus Store to build a spectacular warhorse with a wheelchair embedded in its hindquarters. At an auction of the sculptures, an unknown woman made the winning bid on Baibak’s piece but never picked it up, so he got to park the massive beast a few feet from his office.
Baibak also loves to show students a chair civil rights icon John Lewis sat in during his 2014 visit to MSU. It’s not exactly art, but to Baibak’s mind, it all fits together. At the core of the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities’ mission, and that of the LookOut! Gallery, is unlocking untapped potential for human expression, communication and action.
“How inspiring,” Baibak enthused, gesturing at the chair with Lewis’s portrait emblazoned on the back.
“This could be you, right?”
Perspectives in Black: Emerging Visions
“Sam x Elijah: Making Space x Taking Space”
Through Feb. 23
MSU Residential College in the Arts and Humanities
LookOut! Gallery
Snyder-Phillips Hall
362 Bogue St., East Lansing
FREE
