Sylvie Rosenthal, Lelia Byron, Jason Reblando & Joanne Diaz

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courtesy the artists

An image from "La Ruta: Walter Benjamin’s Last Passage," by Jason Reblando and Joanne Diaz.

The spiffy new space across from The Sylvee that is the new Arts + Literature Laboratory is kind of perfect for pandemic viewing: The big windows and clear sightlines means the public can see the exhibits while remaining outdoors (though the galleries are open noon-5 pm Thursday through Saturday, or by appointment; those going inside must mask up). La Ruta: Walter Benjamin's Last Passage is one of three shows there currently; on Friday, photographer and artist Jason Reblando and poet Joanne Diaz will discuss their collaboration on La Ruta, an installation centered around theorist Benjamin's escape from the Nazis across the Pyrenees. The artist talk will be live on Facebook. The exhibit is on display through Dec. 19, and also includes work by Leila Byron (who will give an artist talk on Dec. 11) and Sylvie Rosenthal (artist talk on Dec. 18).

media release: On exhibit through 12/19. Closed 11/26-28.

Sylvie Rosenthal: Slip, Spill, Fold: Changing Shapes of Meaning (artist talk 5 pm, 12/18: https://www.facebook.com/events/786932592162777/)

Lelia Byron: Tierra de Mujer (artist talk 5 pm, 12/11: https://www.facebook.com/events/484325139216432)

Jason Reblando & Joanne Diaz: La Ruta: Walter Benjamin's Last Passage (Artist talk 5 pm, 12/4: https://www.facebook.com/events/869939850415895)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the galleries will be open to the public for limited hours from 12-5pm Thursday through Saturday or by appointment. Visitors inside the building will be required to wear masks and practice social distancing, and the number of visitors will be limited according to current public health guidelines. Exhibition admission is free.

The exhibition will also be on view through the gallery windows on E. Main Street Thursday and Friday evenings.

Lelia Byron: Tierra de Mujer is a series of paintings made between 2016-2020 by the artist as a response to interviews and collaboration with a group of approximately 300 women farmers in Huila, Colombia that work to produce high-quality coffee beans through environmentally sustainable methods. These women are part of the Mujeres Cafeteras program within the Coocentral Coffee Cooperative, which has about 4,000 families each with their own small coffee farm. While traditionally most coffee farmers are men, this initiative is shifting labor for women in the program from working on household tasks to being entrepreneurial leaders.

Byron began this exhibition by meeting with and interviewing some of the women in the cooperative to learn about how these Mujeres Cafeteras came to be farmers and owners of their own microlots. The stories are diverse, but consistently touch on themes related to labor, land ownership, and a deep connection with the earth. In these paintings, which were completed in 2020, people, objects, and landscapes weave together without an obvious narrative beginning or end. The paintings, which were built up through many layers, reference the intricate layers of producing coffee that include picking the ripe cherries of the coffee plant by hand, fermentation, and drying. In a world full of human-made borders and divisions, coffee is proof of the actual interconnectedness of people across the globe.

Sylvie Rosenthal: Slip, Spill, Fold: Changing Shapes of Meaning, is a multimedia installation-based exhibition that considers global trade and the things that come with it. How plant and biological material has traveled as gifts, specimens, and stowaways has greatly altered world ecology. Every object has its own histories and associations. Materials and forms, along with their attachments, make constellations that continually build, collapse, fold, overlap, and overflow. These meanings fold, spill, and slip through time. 

The works in Slip, Spill, Fold: Changing Shapes of Meaning are materially specific. Native white oak, exotic mahogany, native poplar, and basswoods gesture to the extraction economies that build American cities. The works speak to materials that have been used for domestic purposes in many cultures throughout history. A few of the pieces have a marbleized finish, connecting the entire work to the shallow depths of geologic and natural time. Ideas of preciousness and the exotic, along with the familiar banal pinned on globally traded materials, drove the expansion and the occupation of Indigenous land while also fueling the slave trade. The slippage, spills, and folds are a way to see and attempt to understand the heartbreaking potential of not only this world, but also of other possible worlds.

Jason Reblando and Joanne Diaz: La Ruta: Walter Benjamin’s Last Passage is a collaborative text and image installation centered around the arduous trek Walter Benjamin made across the Pyrenees in hopes of eluding the Nazis who were set on persecuting him. Pairing photography and poetry, Diaz and Reblando draw upon and engage with Benjamin’s own interests—the commonplace, the ephemeral, and the fragmentary, while also exploring the intersections of landscape, exile, and migration.

Joanne Diaz is the author of two poetry collections, The Lessons and My Favorite Tyrants. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches literature and creative writing at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Jason Reblando is a photographer and artist whose work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council. His monograph New Deal Utopias (Kehrer Verlag) was published in 2017. He teaches photography at Illinois State University.