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Artarray provides curatorial services to artists and galleries.
Artarray was established in 2008, and we are located in Salem, MA.
Contact: artarray.gallery@gmail.com
2011 NEW ENGLAND ARTS AWARD WINNER!
Peoples Choice Award for "Best Local Writing about Local Art"
http://gregcookland.com/journal/2012/03/02/2011-new-england-art-awards-winners/
Home Sweet Home: Elizabeth Alexander, Samantha Fields, Kirsten Reynolds
Beverly, MA Montserrat College Art Gallery, 2011
(excerpts below)
Samantha Fields, Wallpapered Space, 2011, mixed media
installation
Essay by E. Tornai Thyssen
Samantha Fields creates much of her meaning with the
intrinsic qualities
of the ready-made and the current configuration [1] gently
probes dysfunctions
of a decaying materialist society. The installation consists
of vinyl
siding, embroidery, and a plethora of knitted and crocheted
coverlets,
commonly called afghans, which the artist considers
the
locus of her current
oeuvre.[2] The synthetic clapboards are pieced together to
recreate
a house’s exterior. The embroidery is stitched directly
through the vinyl, presenting its right side on the exterior. The design grew
from an old
wallpaper pattern Fields studied, dissected and then
rearranged with
a free hand. The new color scheme responds to the bright
hues of the
afghans seen through gaps in the siding.
Fields seems to intuit that the democratic nature of the
afghan enables
ready access to its multiple meanings. Ordinarily used to
warm, protect
and cuddle family members, every knot, loop and strand of
fiber embodies
affection and belonging. Handmade coverlets confirm family
ties and
encode power structure within the home. Although most
families cannot
conscientiously dispose of their afghans, many still find a
path to secondhand
shops and second families. Fields has amassed a collection,
and
while some came from family, most were ‘rescued’ from thrift
stores. As
such they each transpose pieces of others’ history into the
assemblage.
The embroidery on the exterior, and afghans in the interior
explore
relations between the inside and outside, the public or
private. Privacy
today is a vanishing condition and both social structures
and physical
frameworks contribute to its dismantlement. Privacy may be
preserved
at home, although the boundaries that describe ‘home’ have
become
thoroughly permeable and unstructured, even decorative and
false. The
superscripting of hand stitching on the synthetic exterior
is a call to reconnect
our public selves to the virtues of the handmade. Fields
explains
that making by hand is becoming ever more scarce and humans
become
more definitively disconnected from the products of their
own making.[3]
This condition has intensified in recent years as technology
rules every
action we take, and every emotion we recognize.
Fields' installation challenges both technology and its
synthetic product.
The vinyl siding is exposed as a façade, an unsustainable
petroleum
product unable to stand on its own, yet grandfathered into
the collective
consciousness of Americans who continue to embrace its false
logic.
Unaware that they bought into the delusions of the system
through
embracing the falsehoods of advertisers, they reach for more
of the
same: knitting afghans in acrylic yarns, and hand stitching
ornament
copied from mass-produced designs. But Fields is not
pessimistic. She
believes that the act of making by hand is redemptive, and
ultimately
healing. Indeed making ornaments in whatever materials are
at hand is
a distinguishing human impulse, directly related to making
art, as we
make our world meaningful by our design.
notes
1. The work at Montserrat is a joining of two earlier works,
Wallpapered Space I and Wallpapered Space II, both from
2007.
2. New work was recently on view at the NKG Gallery, Boston,
MA (July 2011).
3. Conversation with the author, October 13, 2011 Hyde Park,
MA.
left
 |
| Elizabeth
Alexander, Keeping up Appearances[1],
2011, mixed media installation with visitor
Essay by E. Tornai Thyssen, 2011 Alexander’s installation uses the versatile wallpaper made for interior decoration. Wallpaper references domestic interiors and also signifies affluence and social aspirations. Its current form had evolved in England and its popularity persists since the end of the 18th century, coinciding with the separation of the American colonies from the English empire. Such historical indebtedness enables Alexander to explore both social and personalized meanings, as she embraces her American working class roots and also her English heritage. The installation is conceived in terms of self-portraiture and autobiographical reflection within the larger context of domesticity and history. Wallpaper is treated as a found object. Never pasted to any wall, the pristine lengths are subjected to a thousand cuts until most pattern is excised, remaindering the monochrome background with large voids. This alteration turns the two-dimensional surface into volume in front, behind, and through the paper’s plane. The cutouts are also redeployed into the space around. Performing an inversion, the decorative now becomes functional, collaged into household items like a rug and a chandelier. One expects floral and paisley designs to evoke the tranquility and beauty of a home but Alexander’s reworking voids the original function. With its ornament removed, the monochrome remainder assumes a new identity, and the holes project the paranoia of encountering unknown structures while unmaking the established and the familiar. A feminist motivation may smolder in the aggressive obsessive removal of all decorative elements to force several dialogues at once. Is this an attack on the domestic environment in opposition to the acceptance of patriarchy historically supplying the economic underpinnings for wallpapered interiors? Or is this a recuperation of ornament by a woman artist, historically associated with craft and the decorative? Or is this the autopsy of domestic space where woman had allowed herself to be trapped and now finds the very structure of entrapment as nothing other than ornament? The installation is completed by the recorded sounds of the action of cutting to implicate the body of the artist in action, who wields the creative power to reshape her environment. Thus the sound confirms the identity of the subject and reignites the personal and autobiographical in the installation’s context. Is there an inquiry pitting class, gender and heritage that results in anxiety and the need to control appearances? While the artist’s agency is personal and audible, it merges with responses to historical prompters like the archetypal feminist text, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” rediscovered in the 1970s.[2] Alexander is very much in conversation with layers of history, and has thought hard about the modernist prohibition against ornament. Its deep roots were expressed by Owen Jones in the 19th century when he wrote that “construction should be decorated, decoration should never be purposely constructed.”[3] Later refined by Louis Sullivan into the well-known “form follows function” adage, consistently the masculine prescription, which is skillfully dismantled in this installation. notes [1] Title borrowed from of BBC television drama currently on WGBH Boston. [2] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892 (Reprinted 1973), Conversation with the author, October 6, 2011 Gloucester, MA [3] Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 1856 |
Kirsten Reynolds, Being Done Before, 2011, mixed media installation
(see text below)
You can reach us at our e-mail address: artarray.gallery@gmail.com.
Kirsten Reynolds, Being Done Before, 2011, mixed media
installation
Essay by E. Tornai Thyssen
Kirsten Reynolds’ installation looks like a shattered room
in a comic
strip to be labeled with floating word balloons screaming
CRASH! BAM!
SPLAT! Just what has caused the explosion is unclear,
tsunami, outer-space
phenomenon or was it ray gun blasts? The energy blew walls
asunder,
sending sheetrock through the framing. Wallboards levitate
where floorboards
are expected and studs have settled like French fries
spilled from
its cardboard container. Surprisingly the wallpaper is
unscathed by the
turbulence just past, except for neatly cut openings
everywhere. The
cheerful colors and patterns suggest a [formerly] hospitable
domestic
interior and no feeling of horror is conveyed. A mop and
some rags add
an optimistic tone.
Reynolds designed the installation first as a scale model.
The current
configuration was born after several modifications, and the
architectural
episodes before and after the current scene have existed in
the studio.1
The architectural setting implies a story, but the single,
post-crisis scene
cannot confirm the nature of any events either before or
after the destruction.
The installation portrays an arrested moment in the middle
of a sequence progressing according to a carefully devised
plan. Time
feels suspended and the air has thinned to almost nothing.
Ambiguity
rules, especially as we see that the beams have deceived us.
They are
camouflaged insulation foam, cut, coated and painted to
mimic the
wood-grain of building stock. Wall-designs are stenciled
directly onto
foam board, in a scale out of proportion to the room’s size.
The cut-outs
are unexplained by the pattern of debris settlement and
correspond
neither to structure nor to decoration. The rags and mop are
also fake,
cleverly crafted to affirm our confusion. The tacks hold
nothing together
and all is not quite what it seems.
Disorientation is promoted by the cut-outs. They frame no
view. There
is nothing beyond the walls to see. This condition turns our
viewing
back on itself, and as we explore the installation we become
the missing
figure within. We perceive ourselves in the frames as a
character within
a comic panel. Each cut-out defines a panel and so the
series improvise
into a sequence. Although cartoon narratives do not need the
human
form, a man-made architectural setting presumes one, and as
Reynolds
encapsulates the viewer, the ‘joke’ is on us. The well-laid
ploy triumphs
as our senses are confounded by the perceptual shifting
between the
illusion and reality of the installation.
Some cues alter our sense of scale, especially the
wall-designs, which
enlarge printed origami paper. Stenciled directly onto the
fake walls, they
reference the authority of the small printed sheets, used
for making tiny
objects, the ‘real’ products of this popular art. Origami
paper prints are
distinguished by the even distribution of positive and
negative design
elements within the overall pattern. This equilibrium has
been observed
by Reynolds and its principle transposed into the overall
design. What is
ground and what is pattern, what is solid and what is void,
and eventually,
what is real and what is illusory is posed continuously and
becomes the
activity, like the process of folding origami. By
experiencing the installation
we allow it to become real after all!
note
1. Conversation with the author, October 6, 2011, Newmarket,
NH.
Artarray 2012
Our company was established in 2008 but has been
providing free-lance curatorial services since 1995. Our specialty is
artists and groups of artists who are working to showcase their artistic
identity. Contact us for exhibition organization,
catalog content selection, and verbal and written interpretation. See
what critical dialogue can do to establish relevance!
contact: artarray.gallery@gmail.com
