Danny Orendorff’s last Charlotte Street show favors text over texture

Social justice is Danny Orendorff’s fair-trade bread and butter. During his tenure as curator-in-residence for the Charlotte Street Foundation, his exhibitions have tackled a range of social ills: the wealth gap, gentrification, art-world snobbery, queer bereavement. His final exhibition here, Loving After Lifetimes of All This, again takes up those concerns — centered, this time, on the act of crafting as a means of self-care — but spreads them thinly.

The finest works in Loving require little explanation to connect the curatorial dots. Craft has a homespun, nostalgic connotation, and Ramekon O’Arwisters finds its literal expression in “Where We Are,” which features 40 vintage family photographs (and one framed photo of James Baldwin) interspersed between loops of coarsely woven fabric. The rope snakes across the wall like a Hot Wheels track, and the piece still conveys a linear sense of movement, a timeline of images progressing from folksy Christmas-morning candids to more radical Baldwinian ideals.

Matthew Dehaemers’ organic sculptures capture a similar sense of kinetic possibility. “Rambling Roots” looks, at first blush, like a unicycle-powered hand plow. A single wheel connects to a head of spindly branches, and neon-green accents evoke power and speed. But the construction is fragile, the wheel’s wood-reed frame coated in delicate kinwashi paper. The smaller scale suggests a more intimate agriculture, emphasizing manual toil over mechanization.

Dehaemers’ “Heritage: Reaping, Threshing, Winnowing” is even stronger, uniting nature and machine by placing a veiny barberry root system at the end of a paper tractor tire. The effect has a Rube Goldberg quality to it, those slight-seeming roots extruded through a novel but inelegant system. The colors here, however, are less sunny than in “Rambling Roots,” the roots tipped with ombre flames.

Sonya Clark’s “Barbershop Pole” is similarly assertive, a single-toned version of that familiar commercial symbol assembled from thousands of black pocket combs. The tight construction evokes the texture of natural black hair, and the barber pole’s stripes are raised like the twisting teeth of a drill bit. But the conceit fades quickly, and the pole’s flat, finished top and uniform pattern leave little to digest after the initial pop of recognition.

Clark’s “Flat Twist on a Remnant of Idyllic Days,” on the other hand, is one of the show’s most intriguing and complex works, layered with meaning and memory. The thread piece is built out from a twee Waverly print (“Idyllic Days”) of folksy white people doing folksy-white-people things. Clark controls the scene with a careful hand, twisting a thicket of black threads up from the fabric to redact their faces. The black threads strike a dramatic note against the print’s soft sepias of yore, constricting the scene like a strangler fig. These days weren’t idylls for many, the piece suggests, and Clark’s threads assert the presence of those left out of the frame.

While Clark’s images speak clearly, others communicate in an incoherent jabber. Josh Faught’s “Triage” looks like it could have been assembled from the contents of a bag lady’s shopping cart. Denim, toilet paper, hemp, and books on depression blare across a noisy tapestry that demands too much of the viewer and not enough of Faught. The inclusion of the pink triangle — the symbol foisted on homosexual prisoners in Nazi concentration camps — feels half-baked, a reach for resonance that this piece can’t sustain.

Faught’s work is a symptom of a larger curatorial ill: a multitude of voices unable to harmonize. Some of the art that Orendorff has chosen is simply too varied to spark meaningful conversation, and the result can feel like a social-justice Tower of Babel. Walls of competing text muddle the focus further, making some works feel like ventriloquism rather than invention. A multimedia display on Samuel Eason from the Black Archives of Mid-America is fascinating and instructive, complete with reproduction pamphlets that gallerygoers can take home and peruse. But the overall effect is more archival than visceral — I couldn’t help but feel that I was reading art instead of experiencing it.

Jonathan D. Barnett’s “Drug Rugs” evokes a similar frustration, with the artist apparently requiring two full-page spreads (including a link to his website for further reading) to focus his lens. Barnett’s text explains the work’s genesis: He crocheted each rug as a way to cope with the fatiguing cocktail of anti-retroviral drugs prescribed for his HIV. Words constitute an understandable part of high-context art, even a necessary one sometimes. But we are held at an emotional remove here by having to absorb a written narrative before we can evaluate the rugs’ construction (solid but familiar). Barnett’s story, not the product of his craftsmanship, is the thing on offer for our consideration.

Temporary Services’ “Book Cloud” continues the text-over-texture emphasis, dangling instructional booklets and collected interviews with musicians and artists in front of a soothing painted cloud. The installation is remarkable on its own terms, with an inviting presentation and texts that are surprising and strange. But the links to Orendorff’s theme of craft as self-care are more tenuous, and the piece feels like a tonal anomaly in an exhibition marked by sensitivity to historically disadvantaged populations.

Tina Takemoto’s work is almost strong enough to crystallize Orendorff’s theme. Her film “Looking for Jiro Onuma” imagines a spirited coping mechanism for Jiro Onuma, a gay Japanese-American interned during World War II. It’s rife with sexual imagery and an offbeat sense of play — Takemoto thrusts a fist through some supple dough and dances tenderly with a broom to Abba — seeming at first like an irreverent joke. But Takemoto’s aesthetic inspires (or inspired in me, at least) some uneasy feelings. First: resistance. Are arch lip-syncs to Swedish pop really honoring those who suffered? Second: shame. What ideal am I trying to protect? Why am I insisting on a universal captivity narrative, on a universal captivity experience?

Our narratives of incarceration often commit the same sins that they seek to redress: whitewashing differences until there’s a single story of horror. The impulse is reasonable, in a perverse sort of way: expressing anything but horror seems disrespectful, like laughing at a funeral. Complex experiences and expressions — including, yes, Abba-fueled joy — make suffering untidy.

But an experience, Takemoto reminds us, can be dehumanizing without divesting us of all humanity, can punish difference without erasing it. Of course, there’s a queer experience of internment camps because queer Americans lived through them.

Craft, then, becomes a way to express difference and negotiate self-care in a difficult world. As the exhibition’s title suggests, the artists on display — largely from marginalized or underserved populations — go on crafting crooked valentines to a world that hasn’t returned the favor.

Orendorff is an undeniably gifted and empathic curator. But Loving After Lifetimes of All This ultimately seems to put intellectual responses ahead of emotional ones. Stories and statements may be necessary, their context germane. But through them should shine the ineffable, the passions and impulses that words can’t altogether express. The elements of art that make you say, when you describe a work of art to someone, “You just had to be there,” not, “You just have to read about it.”