Photo and Story by Baynard Woods
Leviticus Lockjaw was born on Halloween night of 1984 from Madonna and marijuana. At least, that’s how Chris Lawson—the artist behind the Leviticus Lockjaw show currently at Windup Space on North Avenue— explained the birth of his artistic impulse over a cellphone as he drove from his home in Birmingham to Andalusia, the home of Flannery O’Connor, where he was going to take down a show he had there. “We were teenagers, and my friend’s granddad had this mansion. He was obsessed with Hollywood and so he built this house that looked like what he thought a Hollywood mansion would look like and we were smoking weed and watching MTV and this Madonna video came on and I just said to my friend ‘We ought to go to Eckard’s and buy some art materials.’ A few days later, the grandfather saw our work and let us make a studio in the attic.”
Looking at the jarring elongated diamond taking up most of the long wall at the Windup, one sees a master collage made up of 157 small collages, and gets the sense that Lawson is some kind of reclusive outsider artist. The fact that he lives in Birmingham, Alabama adds to this impression for many people. Indeed, I’d heard people say that he was some crazy dude living in a cluttered shack. So, of course, once we got on the phone, we really hit it off. I could hear something in his voice. It turned out we came from the same little town outside of Columbia, South Carolina. People from Irmo talk weird and he talked that way.
He also wasn’t as much of an outsider as people wanted to think. When I asked how old he was, he said “Fifty. But people think I’m younger. I have this kind of pop culture sensibility that seems younger.” Even before that attic, he was a writer, studying creative writing and psychology at Transylvania College in Kentucky. “I got lucky and was in Rolling Stone and some stuff. Then I got writer’s block. I just couldn’t do it.”
He claims that the great writer James Baldwin told him he was too young. “You have to have a point of view and you have to live to get that.” Shortly after that, he spent Halloween with a friend and watched “Lucky Star” and became an artist.
Photo and Story by Baynard Woods
Photo and Story by Baynard Woods
There is a real pop culture sensibility to the collages on display at the Windup Space. But they are pop culture through the lens of Flannery O’Connor. Most pop culture is all about manners and the collages are full of such gestures—the sign language of the last century of mass messages. But, O’Connor recognized that the artist depicts the manners of a particular period in order to arrive at mystery. This seems to be Lawson’s primary intent. Like the great collages of Max Ernst and the boxes of Joseph Cornell, Lawson uses cultural detritus to grasp at the ineffable.
Each collage repays careful attention. New details pop out each time you look at one. In one, what appears to be a drawing (but could well be a reproduced photograph) of a pinch-eyed old man with a suit and tie and a scowling mannish woman with a receding hairline and flip curls around her ears are mounted on a torn piece of paper with numerals, indecipherable scrawls, highlighted and separated by lines and boxes. At the bottom of this is a shining, almost obscenely colored foreleg of some cloven-hoofed beast. Others move in strange compositional directions. An arched eye in the center of a record is mounted on a book that is mounted on a map. A man’s face cuts away to a smaller woman’s face. A surgical procedure becomes a C chord on the guitar. A girl smiles at three fingernails in grids.
Photo and Story by Baynard Woods
Some of these have a slapdash quality that encourages the crazy outsider view and can sometimes hurt individual pieces. Lawson used to collaborate with a digital artist, who cannot be named because of some super secret new job, and the works benefitted some from a digitized cleanup. But, real impact of Lawson’s work at the Windup comes from the mass of them. It is mesmerizing to try to listen in on the strange conversation the collages seem to have with one another. The works on display at Windup, really create a single piece.
“When we were hanging them, we kept finding collages we’d never even seen stuck to the backs of other pictures,” said the Windup’s curator Jason Hoylman. “It was like they were reproducing. It is an amazing array.”
The source materials alone are a bit exhausting. Lawson has over twenty boxes of printed matter stored in his house. “In 1985 when I moved to New York to study art, I was always looking for the surprise, hunting materials. There is this mythology and suggestibility of found things. I spent two years in Africa, a year or two in Europe, a lot of time in transit—in Haiti, and if you run out of glue, you go to a seamstress and get her to stitch it.”
The materials and the process are fascinating, but in the end, Lawson seeks to “transubstantiate” his source materials. “Instead of representing the thing I feared, the work becomes that thing itself.”
When his mother asked him if he could possible create some images that were not so intense, Lawson responded “If I didn’t do this, they’d still be in me. How would you like that.”
I, for one, am glad Lawson’s swarm of images made their way up to Baltimore.
Photo and Story by Baynard Woods
Chris Lawson is represented by the Honfleur Gallery in D.C. and is travelling from Birmingham to Baltimore for a reception for Leviticus Lockjaw at Windup Space this Friday, May 27 at 7:00 p.m.
Photo and Story by Baynard Woods
