In Latin, “vesper” means “evening star” or, more commonly, just “evening” — a junction of night and day. Although it refers to a surname in the Contemporary Arts Center’s new exhibit from Titus Kaphar, The Vesper Project, the word feels right at home. Polarities coexist at every turn in The Vesper Project, a culmination of the lost storylines of the Vespers, a 19th-century New England family who “passed” as white despite their mixed heritage, which made them “negro” in the eyes of the law.
Kaphar’s themes are lofty. Racial inequality, criminal justice, fractured identities and the way we traverse the fluxes of time, space and history are braided — sometimes literally — into his work.
Broader cultural and social narratives play an important role. Take “The Jerome Project,” a series in which the artist creates layered portraits from mugshots of men who share his father’s name.
In a poignant extension of this series, the faces of young men such as Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Michael Brown and others are layered on top of each other, like multiple exposures, in chalk on asphalt paper. It is a haunting critique of how society amalgamates these victims’ identities, but also a way to canonize young black men whose lives were stolen.
In “Watching Tides Rise,” an oil painting of a sailboat adrift on a roiling sea of tar, Kaphar peels back a corner of his canvas to reveal the blank wall. The painting acts as a sort of succinct thesis, its wrinkles and warps reflecting an altered history in the exhibit that doesn’t necessarily expose any easy answers.
The title work, a sedulous feat of curation, serves as a centerpiece to the exhibit. Here, the gravity of Kaphar’s themes are draped over an architecture of havoc. A repurposed 1800s home, rebuilt inside of the CAC, is presented like a crime scene, with torn pages from newspapers and music sheets plastered along the walls. A tree is held in place through a cracked window by multiple ropes, kinetic but motionless. The joists of the floor groan under the weight of its guests.
Context is key to fully understanding The Vesper Project. The panel text explains that, years ago, a man named Benjamin Vesper defaced one of Kaphar’s paintings and was later admitted to a mental hospital in New England. In 2008, Vesper escaped the hospital grounds and was found dwelling in a Civil War-era house he claimed belonged to his family, who were able to pass as white in their community. According to the text, the man “needed such a space to return to, in order to engage with his own memory.”
Kaphar restages the house to include artifacts from his own life: a typewriter, a wreckage of furniture, a birdcage. Paintings similar to Renaissance portraits adorn the walls, their canvases mutilated in different ways.
Underneath the weight of Kaphar’s historical questioning, time and space buckle. As meaningful art should do, the reconstructed home of the titular “The Vesper Project” strains the parameters of art by becoming an environment with which you are able to interact; during my visits, viewers loitered outside the structure, unsure of whether or not they could trespass into Kaphar’s spatial and historical jigsaw (you are encouraged to step inside). These lingering caprices force you to become part of the exhibit; Benjamin Vesper’s memory becomes the artist’s and, eventually, our own.
By splicing his personal life with universal issues, Kaphar is able to simultaneously train a microscope on the vagaries of living while making us look at the bigger picture.
The act of curating within the CAC — and within the art world in general — has drawn more and more attention to itself over the years. Whether or not this is a way to gesture toward artifice or is a result of the increasingly complex dynamic between curators and artists is up for debate. At times, The Vesper Project seems like an exhibit of an exhibit. Curiously, Kaphar and co-curator Steven Matijcio chose to include a gallery of photographs documenting the making of “The Vesper Project.” This choice, if anything, helps intensify the ambiguity surrounding the project’s identity.
Art is frequently judged, perhaps too often, by its abilities to reveal truths. Kaphar demonstrates that it is just as important to reveal and challenge the lies — about individual histories, society, and maybe even oneself.
THE VESPER PROJECT is on view at the Contemporary Arts Center through Oct. 11. More information: contemporaryartscenter.org.
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2015.