Suited for success

By David Maurer

Published: September 22, 2008

The work uniform for men who turn the cogs of government in the United States is the basic dark suit.

For the past two centuries it has served as a sartorial symbol of power and prosperity. Don the jacket, be it single or double breasted, and a host of silent statements are broadcast loud and clear.

What perhaps isn’t so forthcoming is who these men behind the fabrics are. Rosamond Casey presents her artistic answer to this question in her exhibit “Men in Suits: A Day on the Hill.”

The show will be on display in the Main Gallery of the McGuffey Art Center

through Sept. 28. The focus of the show are 10 large pictures, each of which expertly combines paint, photographs and scanned images to present rich stories that can be endlessly revised and imagined.

In an introduction to the show Casey writes that she had been raised by men in suits while growing up in Washington. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that she became fascinated by men’s suits and what they represent.

“I think men’s suits are sort of like the Roman alphabet,” Casey said one recent morning as her eyes moved from panel to panel. “They can sustain small changes and variations, but we always come back to the basic style.

“I became fascinated by that, partly because the suit also threatens to take over every regional form of dress in the world right now. Just about everybody who wants to trade in the game of power has to don this suit.

“But it also occurs to me that it’s a great mechanism for concealment.”

Casey explored a number of ways to go about handling the subject. She made small clay figurines of men in suits. Another approach was to wrap bones in suit material, or place bits of fabric in openings she made in the bones.

One after another each idea was abandoned.

“I didn’t want to force anything,” said Casey, who is well known for her skills as a calligrapher. “I just wanted to try as many different possibilities as I could.

“It took me a long time to narrow my focus to more of the hunter’s eye, rather than the gatherer’s eye. What I finally ended up doing was going up to D.C. and taking photographs on Capitol Hill.

“I was definitely motivated by the question, ‘What’s going on up there?’ I took photographs over a period of a couple days with a point-and-click camera. I would go into hotel lobbies, down marble halls, up and down the streets and that’s where I would see all these guys in suits walking everywhere.

“I would try to be discreet insofar as I didn’t flash the camera up in people’s faces. That really influenced the way in which these pictures came out. The fact that I was there with my little secret camera in my pocket and would pull it out every now and again, I think is significant in terms of how you look at the images.

“You notice you hardly ever see a face. And the images you see are almost abstract, because of the way I photographed them on the run.”

Casey said she saw herself as being similar to a wildlife photographer taking pictures in the jungle. The analogy is apt in that she was an outsider photographing subjects in their environment.

“It was as if these guys were the wild animals I was taking pictures of, and I had to be very careful not to startle them,” Casey said. “To this end if I found some trace of habitat I would become just as interested in where they had been.

“For example, I got really interested in the shoeshine area. And when I saw the vacant table in the panel I titled ‘The DoubleTree Hotel Massacre,’ it honestly made me draw in my breath.

“I gave it that title because I imagined these two men walked into the room, sat down, had a cup of coffee, shook hands and the world has not been the same since. The whole order had shifted, because of whatever went down.

“I guess that’s pretty emblematic of what I see here in the exhibit. You have this very ordinary form, the dark male suit, running around. We don’t really know what’s going on, but we know there’s a tremendous amount of aftermath for everything that they do up on Capitol Hill.”

A $1,500 companion book to the exhibition that’s limited to 25 copies is a work of art in itself. It’s bound in Versace cashmere wool, has an engraved brass plate spine and is framed in the same brass channeling as are the large pictures.

“I started creating bound books to go with my last two exhibits,” said Casey, who sold the first copy of the current book to the Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

“I always felt as if I sold one piece from a show that person would only have that one piece of the idea. So the book is my way of providing the whole idea, because it relates precisely to the show.

“I call the images in the book ‘views’ of the panels that are exhibited, rather than reproductions. The book sort of offers a mirror effect of the show.”

The price for her large pictures range from $1,500 to $2,500. Between each of the large panels in the exhibition are smaller photographs in black frames that are an integral part of the presentation.

The smaller images were culled from the hundreds of photographs Casey took during the two-day period on Capitol Hill. They reveal the raw material from which she built the complex and compelling master panels.

It’s in the main works where often obscure images create a visual sleight-of-hand. Previously unnoticed details can suddenly materialize with startling impact.

In one panel what looks to be the tip of a barrel of a gun can be seen sticking out from the cuff of a shirt. Casey had taken the snapshot at waist level so as not to be intrusive. It was only after the photograph was enlarged that she noticed the black, cylindrical protrusion.

The sinister nature of the work, “What Lurks Beneath the Thing He Would Have Said,” is deepened by the shadow of another man close behind the first. The shadow shows what appears to be a raised clinched fist ready to strike a blow.

Equally as arresting is another hidden-in-plain-view image in the panel “The Passion.” The focus seems to be a gaggle of stern-faced security officers, many of whom are wearing suits.

When one notices a Christ-like figure standing far in the background the perception can be altered dramatically. In a moment one can easily imagine the security detail is guarding Jesus.

“That life-size statue of Jesus was really there at the foot of the Capitol Building,” Casey said as she looked at the work. “It looked as if it was temporary to me, but you can see it’s garnering a lot of attention.

“In my opinion, religion has become uncomfortably captive in government. This image miraculously demonstrates that.”

The layout of the exhibit is designed to show the progression of a political career. The panels reveal that it can be a vastly complicated and sobering passage.

“There is a metaphor that exists very strongly in this for me,” Casey said thoughtfully. “It’s the suit itself that represents this transformation that happens to these guys as they go through the halls of power.

“It starts with this purely chipper young man with shiny shoes and formal pants. By the time it gets to the end the legs have taken on the appearance of something that’s collapsing under its own weight.

“When we get to the last panel, ‘Enter the Blue Dawn,’ we see a shaft of light that I can only see as a sign of hope and optimism. Another way to look at this whole thing is that this is just what Capitol Hill does to people and we have to accept that.

“If you come out with a little bit of yourself still intact, that’s good enough. But I see a sadness in this work. There’s something pathetic about this when you really get in there and look underneath.”

“Men in Suits: A Day on the Hill” will be up through Sept. 28, in the main gallery of McGuffey Art Center, 201 2nd St., N.W., Charlottesville. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday.