DEEP WATER COLD FISH

     The sculpture is cold in installation, warm in individual form. It has the physical presence of a single eyelash and a mountain peak. It is vastly cerebral, by Netflix terminology.

     Carrie Myers is a true sculptor in the light of Charles Ray or Eva Hesse, Richard Tuttle or Mike Womack. She is looking at nature, clearly, and grazing social issues like environmental waste, material, and sustainability without jeopardizing a still and quiet kind of magic that happens when visiting DEEP WATER COLD FISH.

     By magic I mean transparency. How can a thousand pounds of glass and mirrors feel so restful, so purposeful and infragile. Everything is floating. This is the room of compartmentalized reality, every object hovering over the line between banal and regal, between ice and atmosphere.

     The work lacks a specific sort of sweetness, a quality that often comes with this sort of sculpture, but elicits warmth and empathy. Every product is contained with display of control and the complete loss of it.

     Association is like poetry for viewers. Approaching a small sculpture on the floor, constructed of a two foot cut of 4x4 softwood carefully wrapped in two separated squares of bubble wrap adhered to the wood with yellow and black para-cord, viewers are given an offering. The viewer is asked to introduce themselves to a foreign entity, and to be open, understanding and kind. The materials are familiar while the logic of the work is extraterrestrial. One might engage a narrative, maybe the bubble wrap and para-cord are a device for the figure, the wood, functioning as clothing. The associations, the narratives and poetry are subjective, and personal. To have a relationship with the work, it is necessary to offer oneself to it. This is not the kind of art that reads quickly, it is not meant for entertainment exclusively.

     Two mirrors carefully wrapped in blankets, supported by a square cut of light plywood, birch, lean against the wall of their own room. They're not mirrors at all, however, when standing between them so one's own reflection is invisible. They are portals, extending the space into forever. Entrances into caverns of subjective realm, a space of democratic logic and romantic fear.

     This phenomenon is echoed by other mirrors and glass. DEEP WATER COLD FISH is installation-specific, reliant on the viewers passage through, and visible space of the work. There are small punchlines offering breathing room among the featherweight doom of the show. Foam wiggle worms friendly and dancing over the confrontation of reflection and transport.

MALKOVICH OPENS

Considering that the town of Bloomington has created a personal vendetta against independent art spaces and is trying violently to banish the community’s art facility, I will leave this article somewhat vague. The information is word of mouth, and only as reliable as a stranger’s honest tooth, which I trust sincerely more than my BLONO councilmen. The show that opened the Malkovich gallery was one of wonder. The gallery is easily concealed, and had I known a ladder was in my future, I may have dressed with more pragmatism.

Zach at Malkovich

Zach and I had a few beers before walking to our secret destination, a gallery within a printmaker’s studio within a gallery. We were greeted warmly.

The gallery was built by hand in the ceiling of a broom closet. The size of the space would be comparable to the famous 5th floor of the Whitney at the scale of a tick. The work in the show was created by a group of artists all having a unique and close relationship with the printmaker. There is no argument that any future work showing in this space must, with consideration, be made with the limitations of the space in mind.

The beauty of this space is undeniable. The cork floors and LED lights give a very polished experience. It is as if viewers are climbing into a Jan Svankmajer-esque mockett of a blue-chip Chelsea cousin. Malkovich, again, is in the ceiling. No more than two people can fit with conversational distance, and for a brief time before each becomes aware of each other's body heat and breath. It is intimate in a way that no other gallery experience can be, by force.

The work was good. Well crafted, tiny, but a show of this format easily falls victim to the novelty of the space. It will be interesting to watch the evolution of Malkovich and the less traditional works that will soon exist within.

The word on the wind is that our super secret future could hold video and sound art, where one can lay on their back in an almost completely isolated art experience. As I’ve come to understand, the common attitude of all artists, when there is a ceiling, break it. In this case, break into it, build a gallery and show art.

Strange Oscillations and Vibrations of Sympathy @ UGAL

Every now and then, a show delivers an experience so profound and expansive, it silences its viewers and provokes heavy consideration. Strange Oscillations and Vibrations of Sympathy, a title selected by Stephanie Brookes from the curated words of Virginia Woolf by Sylvia Plath, does not attack, but suggest a challenge. The show is not exclusive. It is broad, however, incorporating 21 women artists referencing more than 15 women writers. Strange Oscillations had a similar effect on viewers as one would experience in an idyllic feminist family reunion or conference: warmth, empathy, power, humor, love, togetherness.

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Square Toed and Flat Footed), 2003

 With so many references and literary bones in the work, the challenge of connecting variably different work was most likely nothing short of immense. Reading is a critical companion to looking when visiting Strange Oscillations, naturally. Bethany Collins heightens this demand in What good is science fiction to black people?, where a large handmade sheet of stark black paper is covered in dizzy clusters of the title question floating weightlessly. The letters are made of oil pastel, which sits on top of the paper, thick, never settling. The letters appear like confetti, stacked in some areas, completely gestural and formal at first. The drawing easily becomes an analogy for the rest of the show when one considers the fusion of gesture and character, letters and content, and authorship.

Notions of authorship are challenged in the unique collection of work in Strange Oscillations. Uniqueness and individuality are enhanced by the evolution of thought between generations of writers and artists. There are moments of non-plagiarism and evolution available to viewers that challenge the popular, and destructive, concept of individual genius in art.  

Installation view, Melissa Pokorny's As Above, So Below

Cecilia Vicuña, Gabriela Mistral (desnuda con pitahayas y mangos), 1979

   A traditional portrait of Gabriela Mistral painted by Cecilia Vicuña, who explains how Mistral was stripped of her author rights without any later compensation or apology. Vicuña states that past representations of Mistral have been specifically stern, hard and destructively mean. The misrepresentation and editing of women is a conceptual backbone to the show, which is in direct opposition to the control of women and their voices. The combat occurs in the reclaiming of ownership, as the gesture of painting Gabriela Mistral (desnuda con pitahayas y mangos).

  The work in the show is expansive. There are large installations, a handful of videos, sculpture and flat work, including three cotton Jen Bervin works from The Dickinson Composites Series. Bervin is acknowledging Emily Dickinson’s works in these massive felt embroideries, specifically Dickinson’s fascicles, collections of her handwritten poems. The embroideries function as blown up, heavily worked clones of their small, lightweight mothers, produced by Dickinson over 100 years before the works of Bervin.

Xaviera Simmons, Blue, 2016

One street-view window exhibits the work of Xaviera Simmons, an almost in-the-round ply curio of massive jars uniformly capped and each full of high-key colors, ranging textures and rolled up crunkled printouts of people and things. The jars are substitutions for text, and are meant to be read like a poem. Simmons is re-writing Rebecca Solnit in sculpture, with a positive commentary of love and gratitude. There is a loving hand in the work, the jars maternal like Louise Bourgeois’ spiders.

Bethany Collins, What good is science fiction to black people?, 2016

Close up of What good is science fiction to black people?

There is a huge emphasis on support and community in Strange Oscillations, which I can only hope is a key consideration all viewers hold when visiting the works. As Rebecca Solnit stated in a 2012 interview with Guernica Magazine,

“Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty. I’m grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.”

Supporting the voices of women, through means of art or activism, is still a completely relevant and necessary action. The invalidation and silencing of women is woven into standard social practice within the art world. It is the responsibility of institutional powerhouses to use their status to uplift and banish oppressive action. I believe this is a positive direction for Illinois State University and University Galleries. I hope that the attitudes represented in Strange Oscillations will echo and storm in the area long after the show is down. That being said, I will keep my eyes peeled for the 2017 catalog.