Befitting its title, the exhibition “SEAMS” at Portrait Society Gallery (through November 28) is far from a seamless undertaking. While it offers plenty of literal seams in the dozens of quilted, woven, embroidered, and stitched works, the show also presents implied metaphorical seams, between the divergent perspectives on fiber arts from the 17 different artists assembled by curators Heidi Parkes, a local quilt artist, and Debra Brehmer, who operates and directs the gallery.
The exhibition unfolds in many directions, sprawling down the halls, on walls, and in nooks and crannies at PSG, which is slowly expanding throughout the 5th floor of the Marshall Building. That expansion includes a new, beautifully lit space on the north side of the building that features work by Sharon Kerry-Harlan and Judith Mullen, whose two gnarly 3-D works provide bracketing for the show, not merely because they are sturdy, muscular, and sculptural, but because they flirt with the limits of what the average civilian might consider “fiber art.”
Mask VII, a beautifully unruly knot of painted plaster and yarn, defies quaint preconceptions about fibers as delicate, diaphanous, and breezy media. A collision with her craggy object-based textiles would break and bruise the skin. Gracing the walls outside the main space, tucked away in a corridor, are several examples of wearable art garments by Rosemary Ollison and Milwaukee-based textile artist Vanessa Devaki Andrew, aka Madam Chino. A certain amount of righteous skepticism often follows such useful, practical objects into the world of fine art, the skeptics often protesting too loudly while protecting their sacred turf. But like most religious fervor, it’s more fear than virtue. Chino’s coats are essentially wearable sculptures anyway, with all their heft, color, and fluttering layers. In their utility, they help locate the fuzzier, less orthodox edges of the subject at hand.
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Raw Weave of Canvas
Heidi Parkes’ own work graces the north interior wall of the main space. In many ways her quilts live in-between Mullen’s and Chino’s. They exist as functional objects but also as minimalistic 2-D wall hangings, in the tradition of painters like Robert Ryman, Brice Marden and Agnes Martin. A very male dominated history, and Parkes’ invocation of it through traditional domestic media is provocative as much as it is retinally stimulating. It’s worth noting that of the 17 artists in the show, only one is male (Charles Queen,) a fact that serves to both confirm and upend certain stereotypes. Rarely does one witness a group show that just happens to feature 95% female artists, but then again, this is an exceptional realm of artmaking in which many of the primary exponents have been female, from Eva Hesse, to Kiki Smith, to the quilters of Gee’s Bend.
What are the implications of this? We could write a book. But the thought I had while I was viewing what I think is one of the single most extraordinary works of art I’ve seen in years: Jacqueline Surdell’s Melancholy of Always: Sunset in the Rockies (after Albert Bierstadt), was a statement made by Chuck Close about the aforementioned Ryman. Close always noted that when he was prepping his canvasses with gesso, he thought of the highway billboards reminding us that if we lived in a certain subdivision we’d be “home by now.” And he always noted that if he painted white monochromes like Ryman, he’d be “done by now.” My thought was that Surdell’s work, as well as work by others in the exhibition, is more elemental than the monochrome as Close pegged it.
The raw weave of a canvas is more nakedly genetic than the embellished sophistication of even the most reductive painting operation. In the tradition of easel painting, the weave of canvas and linen is truly original; a kind of pre-Expulsion, painterly paradise. Surdell’s captivating network of woven cords and rope grows around and within a chewed-up image of an Albert Bierstadt painting, an artist of the macho late 19th century who himself was battling traditions of established painting along with the Edenic implications of his natural subject matter. Surdell’s work is an elegant note to end on, but not an end by any means. Each of the artists included in this exhibition contribute to the knotty concept of textile-based art, but also help we the viewer to loosen, unravel and stitch it back into our own updated narrative.
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