Birch at Home

By Terrington Calas, NEW ORLEANS ART REVIEW

Willie Birch’s take on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is among the most temperate we have seen-and yet possibly the most affecting. His “Home Sweet Home,” a suite of large-scale acrylic and charcoal drawings (at the Arthur Roger Gallery this fall) presents the tragic images of people and places with the clear-eyed sangfroid of a photojournalist-free of sentimentality, free of conspicuous melancholy. To be sure, the enormity of the 2005 catastrophe is made clear for us, but with an almost alarming degree of control. We see wrecked neighborhood buildings, trees, and everyday folk all delineated with equal unflinching directness, as if to say “This event happened. This is life. This is part of the good and bad of the human journey.” No exhibition on the subject has felt so stoical. These works are an instance where restraint incongruously declares everything-all the horrific truth, all the lingering injury. Birch’s restraint declares things that might have been muddled by overt expression.

And we grasp those things slowly, in our heads. In one deadpan scene of post-Katrina churches, the whole reads as a hushed document. The damage does not seem to be at issue. It’s there, of course, articulated with apparently offhand cues-a fallen awning, the telling Xs on a wall. But, pictorially all of this is mitigated. Birch upstages it by a forceful, dignified presence. He depicts the churches like monuments. They suggest perdurable but vague symbols. And they lead us, mentally, not to the storm’s assault, but to what is missing – to the probable past of these places. We envision kids and ladies in white: we envision hustling activity.

This drawing, Two Churches in the Ninth Ward should perhaps be seen first: it’s a harbinger. There are similar effects throughout the show. In a two-part work called House and Owner on Touro Street, the facade of a double Creole cottage is rendered as stately as an Alberti palazzo – or, closer to home, as a “shack portrait” by legendary photographer William Christenberry. Birch bolsters the classical illusion by emphasizing the dark verticality of the cottage’s four bays. But the noble calm is disturbed. Just slightly. There are two seemingly inconsequential details: a ladder and a small figure working atop the roof. Apart from this, the house is pristine, a fine example of its genre, now virtually deserted. Those small details assert the sad reality that all New Orleanians came to know. Again, by understated means. Birch conveys the tenor of crushing loss.

And there is something else. Somehow, with the delineation of that facade, he creates a certain poetry-in-bleakness that recalls Edward Hopper’s best work. Birch seems to understand such poetry. He seems to understand, as Hopper did that emotional eloquence is an effect not of stagy maneuvers, but of compositional nuance and judicious detail. Throughout the show, there are moments like this. They serve to blur the cruel clarity of so much destruction.

Formally, while Touro Street is symmetrical and almost severe, other works in “Home Sweet Home” are far more complex. Still, Birch’s emotional restraint persists. Back Yard on Villere Street is an enormous composite drawing. It submits five views of the yard, each a startling melange of fences, vegetation, and house fragments. The immediate look of the piece suggests an all-over abstraction, a sort of Pollockian design that leads your eye non-stop around the picture plane permitting no single focal point. The formation is so visually arresting that we almost sidestep the essential thrust – that these are the strewn vestiges of somebody’s home. In fact, we see precisely that – one vignette at a time. The composition intrigues you; each segment, after a brief moment, disquiets you.

In instances where Birch features the human figure the result often feels like pure document, a forthright chronicling of post-Katrina life by way of genre scenes. A notable exception, however, is Contemplation: Yesterday, Today. The work has three abutted portions. They depict respectively, the iconic Riverboat Natchez paddling up the Mississippi; two jazz musicians performing on a park bench and; most prominently, a lone young woman sitting in a bank of thickly-grown liriope, leaning on her knees, and staring out toward a cropped-off vista.

Initially, if glanced over, the drawing could seem trite. Consider: the celebratory past, the forlorn present. A simple and, perhaps, sentimental message. But, in fact, it”s the most profound thing in the exhibition. Certainly, there is nothing trite about the portrayal of the woman; one could scarcely imagine a more potent emblem of isolation and hopelessness. And, more important, Birch deploys it with the calm and discretion that suffuses most of this series. As a result, we perceive the woman”s despondency as something ancillary to a larger issue — very likely the uncomfortable and lingering issue of race and class in America.

The inference here is a circumstance keyed to our city’s ethnic majority. On the one hand, certain people are prized for their otherness – as entertainers (in every connotation of the word) – but, on the other hand, that otherness signals a pitiless marginalization. This condition is no secret and, obviously, was in place long before Hurricane Katrina. But we seldom thought of it; we simply did not consider how it affects people. We did not consider how venomous it can be. A work such as Contemplation implies that the consequence of marginalization is exacerbated in the storm’s aftermath; implies that, for many locals, massive flooding and displacement and family deaths constitute an addendum to already existing distress. Ultimately, the piece suggests that we try to imagine such fathomless suffering. The seated woman is its symbol.

It is to Birch’s credit that “Home Sweet Home,” so compelling in its final implication, is presented in a way that engenders more thought than passion. If art is ever to effect social reform – the idealistic aim of our modernist forebears – it might follow this lead.