Life and death … can be an art!: Terrain gallery honors Isamu ‘Som’ Jordan

Included in the “Be an Art” exhibition opening this Friday at Terrain Gallery is a retro TV set showing the late local rapper Isamu “Som” Jordan explaining to a crowd what “an art” is. After each word about “art” that Som shouts out, he has the audience respond: “Can be an art!”

“Soul!” Som happily yells in the video. “Can be an art,” the audience shouts back.

Som revs up the call-and-response: “Rhythm! … can be an art! Silence! … can be an art! Language! … can be an art! Vanished! … can be an art! Education! … can be an art! Separation! … can be an art! … Listening! … can be an art! … Voting! … can be an art!”

It’s a scene from the cosmic creative church of the Rev. Som, more than a decade ago, back when his followers were bathing in Spokane’s vibrant waters of small venues, freed minds and imaginative powers.

The Be an Art show is a joyful tribute to the fiercely creative and tragically brief life of one of Spokane’s most beloved local artists. As the frontman of the Flying Spiders, Spokane’s high-flying hip-hop orchestra, Som was a mentor to more than just the 11 musicians who, off and on, made up the band. He was a teacher to all local creatives who wanted to express. A skilled promoter who pushed local musicians and the Spokane music scene to new heights. An arts activist who made it his mission to lift up others and bring them on stage, literally and metaphorically.

The poet, writer and Whitworth adjunct professor devastated his community when he took his own life at 37 years of age, 11 years ago. But the Be an Art show serves as more than just a reminder of who we lost; it’s a signpost pointing to what Spokane can gain when we embrace our creative people.

But what does “Be an Art” mean? Who or what can even be “an art”? And why?

These are the questions that arise during the fascinating journey that the show’s co-curators, artists Rajah Bose and Thuy-Dzuong Nguyen, take audiences through as they experience the life and times of an artist and his friends. The show is a hyper-nostalgic trip through a changing town that was enjoying its own explosion of expression at the same time that Som was acting as cipher for all those trying to make sense of, or find beauty in, the every day.

Photojournalist and former Flying Spider violinist Bose takes Som’s challenge to “be an art” as a serious mission. It bothers him that newspapers always put art alongside entertainment, as if they were the same thing.

“So many people just don’t know what art is at all … (They) don’t understand what it is for, and that’s not to say that my definition of it is right,” Bose said. “It’s like art is a universe of ideas and concepts, but what is in YOU can be the art.”

If anyone’s life was “an art,” it was Som’s. Evidence abounds throughout the Be an Art show, from the vibrant candid photos taken of him rehearsing in a cramped living room by Spokesman-Review photographer Tyler Tjomsland, to the playful installation Bose created around Som’s favorite “Flash” sweatshirt.

The superhero/villain/comic aesthetic is a recurring theme of the exhibition, a nod to Som’s obsession with comic books. The rapper anointed his fellow Spiders with nicknames that hinted at secret identities, suggesting that all artists are really superheroes in disguise.

Saxophonist Cameron LaPlante was known as “Sparky” or Sparkimus Prime. Guitarist Justyn Priest, who helped organize this show, was dubbed “General JP the Surgeon.” Som teased Bose with the nickname “Got Money.” Brian Mueller was “Brian the Brain.”

For the show, Bose spray-painted masks around the eyes of several of the Flying Spiders in his photographs, in homage to the superhero status that Som bestowed upon them.

“Part of this idea is that we veil ourselves, you know, behind these masks, behind these personas that we are on stage,” Bose said.

Som nicknamed pianist Nguyen “Queen Bee,” which makes her role as the band’s historian and audio documentarian especially fitting. Nguyen worked at The Spokesman-Review as a digital media producer with Som, who wrote a column for the 7 section, and photographer Bose, until all three were laid off in 2008. From the ashes, Som gathered the first Flying Spiders.

“I didn’t realize we were signing up for alter-egos, or to become part of his science fiction plot and dark superhero franchise,” Nguyen said. “I had the honor and privilege of making music with my best friends – magic that I imagine happening in basements and garages everywhere.”

Even something as common as numbers were an art to Som, so it was on Oct. 10, 2010, (10/10/10) that “The Flying Spiders featuring Som Jordan” performed their very first public show at the A Club.

An important part of Som’s artistic vision was to promote “social justice and connectedness,” Nguyen said. In that vein, the Terrain show will include a video created by Bose that gives disturbing personal testimonies of racist incidents experienced by several local artists and residents, including Shantell Jackson, Ginger Ewing and Carl Richardson. The video is titled after a Som lyric, “Happened Right Here.”

Several other artists with ties to the band created work for the exhibition, including Jason Corcoran, (aka Freetime Synthetic), a painter and graphic designer who occasionally rapped with the Spiders; Adam Crowell, a graphic designer who created the Flying Spiders art and albums; artist Tracy Poindexter-Canton; Spokane Falls Community College art professor Richardson; and graphic designer and emcee Jason Bagge. Som’s children Caleb and Osiah Jordan consulted on the show.

The exhibit includes a wall of Som’s lyrics for patrons to decipher, many with local references to other artists and friends. The turns of phrases and clever rhymes bring into sharp relief what an incredibly gifted writer and poet the rapper was.

Here is Som’s song “Break Ya Spine:”

Divided by a river livin’ right next door

To some of the craziest white boys on Earth

But it really didn’t matter than cuz all of us was poor

All we had was a dream, driven by sports

I Jess write it on the Walter show it

I’m real live “Financial Lives of the Poets”

I’m retro, Spokane Metro, Benny and Joon, Yates and Coe I’m one thousand nine hundred and seventy four butterflies at the World Expo I’m Spokane’s Destro, I D.E.S.T.R.O.Y. like the last song did ask your stepbro I’m Spokane love

Spokane ain’t cool with the way that I get in the club

Spokane is a part of my anatomy

So take me out but you can’t take the town out of me

I’m a Black astronaut from Cheney I rest peacefully

And my whole family’s proud of me

And Spokane doubted me

Now I’m one of Spokane’s finest like the Seely Academy

No matter how hard I try I still can’t sing, like it or not

I’m a Spokane rhymist

And when I write it’s so heavy it’ll break ya spine

Som seemed to have been hitting a creative peak when his flame went out just three years after the Spiders officially took off. His loss still ripples through the massive web of local musicians, artists, and fans who were touched by his words and music.

Sometimes our most talented artists can also be the most broken inside. Art can hurt. Art can heal. Art can inspire. Art can keep going. Be an art.