With the advance of the Covid-19 pandemic and the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement, voices that urge interdependence and cooperation among people and nations are more vital than ever.
“One of the things moving me forward right now, and it has been for a while, is symbiosis,” Darlene Charneco said during a conversation in March at the William Steeple Davis House in Orient, where she is the resident artist. “I’m learning more about the interspecies mutualisms that have evolved through time and how we are a product of that.”
In March, days before the pandemic shut down the Guild Hall Artist Members Exhibition and pretty much everything else, she was given top honors in that show by Susan Thompson, an associate curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. "With Darlene's work it was a case of the uniqueness of the medium and her really interesting activation of the materials," she said after selecting the piece from scores of submissions.
While Ms. Charneco’s practice draws from many physical and conceptual elements, it’s hard when considering her artwork not to start with the most obvious -- the nails. She shifted from painting to sculpture while earning a B.F.A. at Southampton College. At the same time, she was always writing.
“I was creating sculptures and I was keeping journals, and a lot of what was processing in my mind was in written form,” she said. “I couldn’t quite figure out how to express it in the pieces. Bit by bit, the writing and sculpture started to meld.”
A piece called “The Letter,” created before she entered the M.F.A. program at Stony Brook University, consisted of nails hammered into two-by-fours covered in aluminum sheeting.
“I wanted tactile writing, but using all the languages of humanity.” She hammered the nails into letters, which drew from different alphabets, including cuneiform, Braille, and even a code she’d made up as a seventh grader. The sentences for that piece were questions Ms. Charneco was asking the universe.
She then began to use a code of nails to write letters on wooden panels about her personal life, addressed “To Whom It May Concern.” These led in turn to her “Book of Hope,” an ongoing series begun in 1999, with a new page created every few years that expresses her hopes, prayers, and wishes for humanity.
“Even though people can’t read it if they don’t know the code, I hope it will convey beyond its literal self.” She has written that the “Book of Hope” is made in the spirit of “the European monastic scribe illuminating manuscripts, or a Tibetan monk creating a sand mandala . . . sent as messages requesting guidance for the peaceful evolution of humanity.”
While nails can connote danger, both visually -- the art-historical representations of crucifixion, for example, and physically -- the patterns Ms. Charneco weaves are sensual and evocative. Moreover, her view of life on earth, its history and its possibilities and its future, underlies her diverse projects. Her sources include Buckminster Fuller, history, and microbiology.
Microbiomes, micro-organisms such as bacteria, fungi, and protozoa that live in symbiosis with the human body, offer a metaphor for her view of individuals and society. “Each of us is a multitude of species in one body, and we are within a larger body.”
Her interest in microcosms, macrocosms, and shifting perspectives of who and what we are led to her “Petri Playground” series. Each piece consists of nails, resin, acrylic, enamel, and miniature toys and props on a panel. The circular compositions have characteristics of both an aerial view of a community, including miniature houses and greenery, and a view through a microscope of bacteria or viruses.
Ms. Charneco is one of two artists who had been selected by the Parrish Art Museum for its off-site 2020 Road Show series. Titled “Symbiosome,” which she defines as a “vacuole within an organism that hosts a different organism in symbiosis,” it has been postponed because of the pandemic, with a future date to be determined.
She thinks of the William Steeple Davis House as a kind of symbiosome, “a safe place to think and create.” The Davis house is one of two dwellings -- the other is her childhood home -- that comprise her recent diptych “House Readings (Ars Memoria),” the first project she completed in Orient. Each is a house-shaped wooden panel, painted white, whose surface is articulated by nails and a few dollhouse-size props.
“This is a historical house,” she said of the Davis house. “The layers are amazing. It’s such an experience to be in this space and read the stories of the people who lived here.” Some of the nails in the house pieces represent windows or stairs, but they are more fundamentally “thoughts and hopes for humanity going forward.”
Ms. Charneco was born in the Bronx in 1971 and moved to Ronkonkoma when she was 3. Her parents were originally from Puerto Rico, and she still has relatives there. She is hopeful about future visits, especially in view of Hurricanes Irma and Maria and the recent earthquakes on the island. “I think I’m always connected to Puerto Rico. It is in my blood, and when I am there, I feel it and smell it and it is a part of me.”
A piece from her “Prayers and Weaves” series that was shown at Praxis Gallery in Chelsea in 2018 was a prayer for Puerto Rico’s recovery after Hurricane Maria. “There are groups of people there who are trying to create a sustainable, more community-based way of life, and it’s inspiring and fragile and painful to be connected to it.”
Each nail in the prayer pieces represents “wishes and positive visualizations. I have a list of local and global causes I’m thinking about and for each one the nail is a little energy pulse I send out that I feel can go where it’s needed and help those seeds grow and those organizations to expand.”
The Davis property, a stone’s throw from Orient Harbor, contains a small two-story house and a separate studio. A lifelong Orient resident born in 1884, William Steeple Davis was a painter and photographer who died in 1961, leaving his house and land in trust to be used by artists for living and working. “I’m so incredibly grateful for this precious time here and the support and encouragement I’ve felt from the trustees and community,” said Ms. Charneco. Because of the pandemic, her yearlong residency has been extended for a second year, until October 2021.
“The extension allows me to let what’s happening in the world continue to inform works, as opposed to having to wrap it up into a statement at this point. The world is not wrapped up right now in any way, and I want to feel through what’s happening and see what we can learn from it.”
“Part of my symbiosis studies is looking at nature closely and taking in things slowly. I go to the pier and look at barnacles and this amazing lace-like bryozoan. Each is an organism, but it is also part of a colony, living on the wood of the pier, on boats, and on crates. I also photograph things I love, like lichen, which has algae, fungus, and bacteria working together to create a whole new organism.”
“I want us to think of ourselves in that way. What is it that we are forming together that is newer, and what is it that we perhaps need to balance in our relationships and in our groups and nations to have it work better together so that all of us benefit?”
