Art Lies, Volume 52, Fall 2006 Page: 97
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Charles Beronio and Sasha Dela: Blackout
DiverseWorks
Margo HandwerkerCharles Beronio and Sasha Dela's collaboration at
DiverseWorks began with a carefully chosen title,
the loaded word Blackout, which connotes the cen-
sorship of information, the loss of consciousness,
memory, vision and/or the failure of electricity or
illumination. Beronio and Dela use this expression
as a conceptual and visual motif, exploring the irre-
futable impact of various forms of ignorance and
collapse on our interaction with each other and the
environment.
Dela's Super Nova Mirror sets the tone of the
exhibition by confronting visitors with the desire to
consume and the impact of that compulsion on the
natural world. Staring into one of several circular
mirrors, viewers see themselves alongside cutouts
from Natural Geographic and SkyMall-like peri-
odicals. Wedged between white owls and worth-
less gadgets, housing development advertisements
and satellite photographs, one's reflection begs the
question of placement within this hierarchy: are we
the snow owls, miffed members of the ecosystem,
or are we housing developments monopolizing the
planet's resources?
Dela took this inquiry further by crowning the
collage with an announcement for the new World
Trade Center complex. Slated to be among the
largest buildings in the world, Larry Silverstein's
"Power Towers" reinforce the misguided notion
that unbridled competition is an inevitable conse-
quence of the struggle for dominance, even if one
is already LEED-certified.
In Black Light, Beronio evokes a specific aspect
of the show's title-an informational blackout-by
darkening the gallery's fluorescent lights. By pre-
venting the fixtures from illuminating the space
and its occupants, Beronio emulates Caravaggio's
The Calling of Saint Matthew, using light as a met-
aphor for revelation-or in this case, a lack thereof.
Beronio also screened the windows with dark mesh
circles from his recent project Sunspot, which
involved covering patches of grass in a public park.
In a photograph pinned alongside these circular
shades, it is confirmed that the lawn in Sunspot
died without light-without illumination.
Many of Beronio's works literally kept viewers
in the dark, but they certainly aim to enlighten. Take
If for example. Using a black-on-black commercial
banner, Beronio proclaims, "If you have no money, if
you're not makin' money for them, they have no use
for you." Words articulated by a Hurricane Katrina
survivor, this statement calls out the government'sLEFT & RIGHT: Charles Beronio and Sasha Dela,
Blackout, 2006
Photos by Brent Chaddock
unwillingness to acknowledge the classism and
institutionalized racism that lingers today.
Dela, too, brings such issues to light. In Mixed
Volumes 2, she created a sort of library of environ-
mental consciousness-a reading room with books
on such topics as disaster response in Louisiana,
endangered birds and innumeracy. Looking closer,
one finds that the artist replaced the content of
each book with catalogues and magazines sug-
gesting, among other things, that the ideas these
books represent are often viewed as commodi-
ties themselves, which risks dulling if not nullifying
their power as informative tools.
Accountability was also an important theme;
simply being educated about certain issues is not
enough to bring about change. Dela's To George
Bush Intercontinental, however, only went halfway
in this respect. Although the thirty-nine-minute
video of the artist driving to the airport revealed
the regrettable results of commuter/consumer
culture-strip malls and other symptoms of urban
sprawl-ironically, the very act of taping it burnt
thirty miles worth of gas. No-Fly Zone tackled
the same target to better ends through brightlycolored tassels hovering above the parking lot.
Most commonly found at used-car dealerships,
these rainbow fringes celebrate consumption and
foster our artificial dominance over the natural
world: tassels actually prevent birds from defecat-
ing on cars.
Although there seems to be little room for alle-
gory in activist art these days (notwithstanding
effectual endeavors like archi-treasures, the Pond
and municipalWORKSHOP), Beronio and Dela
have mastered this device. Beginning with a single
prompt, they show their audience how to think, not
what to think. The works trigger connections that
viewers might not otherwise form, making con-
cepts easier to internalize. The two wall< a fine line,
however, since it is difficult to illuminate those who
choose to stay in the dark.
Governmental responsibility is central to the
exhibition, but a subtler and more significant
theme is individual accountability. True, the gov-
ernment restricts access to information, effectively
ignoring or encouraging behaviors that negatively
impact our lives, but information is out there. We
need only take Beronio and Dela as an example
of how to educate ourselves-and each other-
and how to alter our behavior to the benefit of
everyone.ARTL!ES Fall 2006 97
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Bryant, John & Gupta, Anjali. Art Lies, Volume 52, Fall 2006, periodical, 2006; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228017/m1/99/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .