“INDIGNITY” OPENS ON SATURDAY 9/28

by Jacquet Kehm

Editor’s Note: Last year, I befriended the artist Dyvika Peel and found myself invited to a group show at a semi-abandoned church in Wilkinsburg, called Eschaton. I knew almost nobody there, and had just launched a project called Petrichor, an art magazine I had wanted to start for a long time but finally got the push to. The entirety of 2023 was a bit of a tumultuous time for me where I was hopping from job to job, traveling, moving apartments, and unsure what exactly I wanted to do with myself. I invited my close friend Aletheia to come with me to this strange show, and we had some heart-to-heart discussions while wandering around the church space called Center for Civic Arts (710 Mulberry Street). This became the first thing I wrote on Petrichor and was formative to me in my vision for the magazine, by creative people and for creative people mixing essays, features, and off-the-beaten-path adventures into what’s happening in Pittsburgh. On Saturday, 9/28 curator Jacquet Kehm has put together another show at Center for Civic Arts: Indignity. To raise some awareness about this project, I asked Jacquet a few questions about the show and his vision for the space.

Petrichor: Since this is your second exhibition in the Center for Civic Arts, what did you learn from the last exhibition that you’ve implemented this year in the next one?

Jacquet Kehm: I guess I’ll say this—one of the things we tried to accomplish last year was gathering a mix of folks with varied art forms that could bring some of Pittsburgh’s balkanized arts communities into the same spaces. Art for me is art —whether it’s theatre, painting, writing, whatever—I can learn something about drawing from going to watch a dance performance. I’ve been puzzled by others that don’t seem to share that outlook. Usually you see the writers at the readings and not at the gallery openings, and vice versa, with all the groups. Personally I believe a lot of the best visual art in the city is actually in the DIY theatre scene.

Anyhow, people seemed to respond to the blending well, so we leaned into it more. Our opening last year took place during a tour of Wilkinsburg’s churches, and we had older folks there to see architecture surprised to find themselves taking in a strange performance about Leviathan, partially-voice layered poetry, partially-puppet show, which I found to be a thrilling encounter. This year we have added media art, ceramics, fiber arts, and the October programming includes a dedicated night with readings and one with performances that will take place amidst the show.

I suppose I’ll also mention, in a nuts and bolts way, it is not an easy location to put on a show: there are no outlets, no overhead lighting, the light dramatically shifts with the hour, the walls are unforgiving. I think we’ve figured how to tame that a bit more this go around as well.

What was the selection process like for the artists in this show? 

Here’s a funny little secret—if you ask an artist if they want to be in a show, they’ll likely say, YES. This year I invited a decent number of artists I’d never met before, maybe encountering their work in a gallery like four years ago, or just happened to see online two days before. Some have never shown before; some are quite well established names in the scene.

But I’d say the process was a bit more concept driven from the jump this time. I reached out to artists in whose practices I saw the theme represented, explained a bit of how I was thinking about the show, then I kicked it over to them and invited them to suggest pieces that resonated with what ‘indignity’ meant to them.

[**No artist statements were read in the creating of this show.

Being in the thrall of Big Personal Branding is undignified.]

The theme “Indignity” is different than the prior “Eschatology” concept. How did you come up with the new concept and how does it relate to the old one?

Well, honestly it came out of living during a genocide we’re supporting and, at the time, the looming Trump-Biden election, Fetterman’s existence. You know, all the things we think about ourselves, individually, collectively—the pinnacle of evolution! heirs of great thinkers, inventors, philosophers, practitioners of the sacred—and we’re seriously here? What an incredible moment, how hollow all of that becomes. And what does it say, and what do we say, then? Something about our estimation of ourselves is off.

And then, sitting with the concept, it branched out—putting up with all the various indignities of being alive (and dying, clumsily, perhaps)—aging, the body failing, becoming incompetent, incontinent, therapeutically unfixable, compromised, systemically disrespected, calculated, monetized, surveilled, ‘managed’, abused, silenced… again, all this occurring while our ‘better angels’ look on, from somewhere. Or maybe they’re distracted scrolling the apps now, too.

Eschatology is sort of man’s ‘big cope’; this show is a bit more about all the small reconciliations we make along the way, or all the things we simply have to put up with and be witness to. And though the theme is indignity, naturally the counterpoint of dignity that resides in challenging all of these things makes itself present. The making of art to point at these things is a form of that.

More personal interest than anything else: Is the Pittsburgh Puddle Museum in the show again? 

This was definitely one of the standouts from last year! The work of Mike Kelly. There was a good deal of drought this summer, however, and unfortunately, the puddle museum has evaporated for this iteration, existing somewhere in a vapor state I imagine. A big thing for museums, Climate Change versus The Collection.

There’s a special Election Day event listed—can you share anything about that?

I can’t say I have ever seen another event of any kind that is actually fun planned on Election Day. So that was one thing I was sitting with. And I think finding community in a perhaps ‘transcendent’ way on Election Day could be nice. Rise above the farce.

If you’re in Wilkinsburg, you can vote for the new form of government I led the design of (www.wilkinsburgpa.gov/wgsc)—and you should!

Maybe it’ll be the weirdest watch party to ever take place. But no, I’m hoping to detach from that and provide a space for that distancing for others. The world we’re forced to exist in will be there the next day, but for some hours on that evening, we can inhabit some better world. Expect some sort of feasting, some ways to take a load off, something weird, and hopefully some fine people to share that space with. More details to come.

What do you hope is the future for the Center for Civic Arts?

I propose two things—one is, artists need to self organize more. When places like AAP use their annual show to invite mostly nonmember and non-Pittsburgh artists, and ship it two hours away from the city, one has to wonder. Institutionally, there’s a strange phenomenon in that one artist seems to break through with a show, then they do the whole circuit of every space in 1-2 years, or there’s a new guest curator in town everyone gets a piece of, all at once. We need to think more along the lines of the salon de refusés, instead of everyone waiting in line, hoping to get their turn.Find, or found, new spaces.

The other part of civic arts is how to actually make art functionally meaningful in society. Politics is an ugly word in this country, because we’ve completely divested ourselves from it locally, where it is actually present and useful, and fallen to mere sloganeering. It’s just that spooky action at a distance now. And art that is ‘political’ in our context is usually ham-fisted—“Behold, I included a watermelon”—or self-justifying by so many ‘lenses’, and academicized, and its display is liberal pat-on-the-back window dressing.

Art can and should actually be a powerful motivating force towards reframing things, from which people act and behave differently. I find everyone being pushed into their own very special corner, seeking uniqueness in their artist statements or how they’re identifying, to be very corrosive to this goal.

My hope is that the Center for Civic Arts can serve as a conduit to these ends, and artists can be having more shows about things that really matter, things everyone is touched by, rather than shows about ‘movement’ or ‘beginnings’ or ‘elements’, that treat artists as though they’re some sort of monk, proffering an intellectualized hodgepodge about a watercolor that’s pretty much blue, as opposed to work that is severe in its criticalness of reality and its ambitions of what else could be.

The artist has an important role in envisioning what else we can have. “There can be no revolution without the collectivization of desire,” you know.

See you at the show!

Jacquet Kehm is a multimedia artist living in Wilkinsburg.

INDIGNITY opens September 28, 5PM-8PM, at 710 Mulberry Street. There will be a reading event on October 5, 5PM-7:30PM, and performances on October 19 5PM-7:30PM. The Election Day Special will be on November 5, 4PM-8PM.