Sarah FitzSimons is showing her magnificent Pacific Quilt at Hawthorn Contemporary here in Milwaukee. The exhibition is called Ocean Object, and features the enormous textile, in addition to related drawings and smaller sewn works by this Madison-based artist.
The exhibition at Hawthorn is an unusual opportunity to see this work. It flows over the floor, filling up the center space of a fairly large room. Basically a quilted bathometric map, the gallery describes the work as:
Pacific Quilt spans 21 ft x 24 ft with one inch representing 25 miles. In translation from ocean to quilt, varying shades of blue fabric convey underwater topography and sewn quilt lines extend out in organic swirls to describe surface currents.
The quilt can be seen in its entirety, as it is laid out on the gallery floor. It is envisioned by the artist as useable, despite being distinctly non-utilitarian, as it is very big (my museum background sent cascades of red flags: it will get dirty! how could such a large textile be cleaned! would it fit in my car?). Too large to be easily transported, too immense for any bed, and indeed most rooms. What would it be like to be wrapped in such a vast sea?
The Pacific Ocean defined my childhood and my young adulthood. A transplanted Californian, I still retain the (now problematic) habit of assuming that large water indicates a westerly direction. I played in that ocean, looked out over it, turned green with seasickness while out on it, almost drowned in it (saved by an unknown surfer), and have wandered along its wet sand from San Diego to Arcata. I have also sat on one of its beaches and looked east, towards a very distant home, marveling at the circuit my life had made, from conception to adulthood, across that expanse of water.
Maybe due to the recent disruption of moving to a new job and a new city, I wanted to locate something of me, of my experience, in this blue expanse on the gallery floor. I found myself walking around the Pacific Quilt looking for familiar spots–San Francisco Bay and Baja California—which are geographically distinct and turn out to be identifiable even at this scale. I walked around the entire blue, undulating ocean, from the Arctic, along Asia, to the Antarctic and up along the Americas. And on a quilted map of the Pacific floor, on the floor of a gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I was able to find something known, a small connection to home, a confirmation of myself.
Vast, unimaginable, powerful, beautiful. Bathometry to bedroom, ocean floor on gallery floor. Traveling the circumference of the Pacific Rim, gazing over the depths and islands, bays and continents. Imagine wrapping yourself in the ocean blue. Pacific Quilt is on view from June 8 – August 23, 2019 at Hawthorn Contemporary in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
What is it about original, handmade jewelry? Pieces purchased directly from artists, the chance to visit in the studio, to get a glimpse of the process? I am lucky. I own jewelry that has been purchased directly from artists, some picked up in studios, others at art fairs, or online. Weirdly, happily, wonderfully, I have ended up with a number of works, acquired by purchase or gift, by Madison-area artist Teresa Faris.
I have wanted to write about Faris’ work for a long time. A metalsmith here in Madison, Faris teaches at UW-Whitewater and makes compelling, visually engaging jewelry. She is an artist who works in an art form that can be functional (worn), but who pushes her material and its expectations in decidedly non-functional directions with a process that excavates and increases the medium’s capacity to convey meaning.
Faris is not alone in this effort to crack open the world of jewelry and stoke its expressive power. Many artists in recent years have been traveling on this same path. The exhibition that just opened at the Chazen this weekend, Shelter: Crafting a Safe Home (organized by Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh), includes work by two other jewelry artists who are exploring this same, meaning-laden landscape, Motoko Furuhashi (another HSU grad!) and Demitra Thomloudis (an SDSU MFA). Although centered on different issues, all three of these artists utilize metal, in combination with other materials, to expand beyond beauty and decoration. In their work they contemplate physical space, personal identity, and the expressive power of experience, process and making.
Demitra Thomloudis, Houston Yellow Tape Project (detail), installed at Chazen Museum of Art, November 2018
In Houston Yellow Tape Project, a work included in the Shelter exhibition,Thomloudis presents a street map of a neighborhood that identifies only sites where homes have been torn-down. The map is enhanced by individual jewelry pieces that hang from the highlighted lots. The jewelry is an unexpected addition to the map, acting almost as game pieces, like the small metal shoe or top hat place-holders that occupy squares, indicating presence on a Monopoly board. Here they hang in front of a simple graphic of streets and lots. Some pieces are obvious as jewelry–pendants on chains, necklaces, brooches–but their materials deny expectations: some are constructed out of upholstery foam, others distressed wood, plastic, or unknown items.
The individual pieces are crafted of debris from the houses whose sites they mark. Thomloudis has gathered specific construction detritus and created functional works. The works serve as memorials to the demolished homes and to the neighborhood’s loss. They also, according to the artist, are intended to provide points of connection between people when worn, as conversation starters, as a means to connect and educate and share stories of what is gone.
Motoko Furuhashi
Furuhashi is interested in similar ideas of place and specificity. The brooches and necklace that are included in the exhibition do not indicate loss, but rather utilize overlooked materials to redefine a sense of place. The artist takes map views and translates them into jewelry supports: street grids become the structure for brooches or the underlying organizational scheme of a necklace. The works are bejeweled not by precious stones, but by chunks of asphalt and concrete that have been excavated from locations noted within the mapped sites.
In combining a bird’s eye perspective and site-specific materials, Furuhashi creates abstracted portraits of places. Physical experience is represented in these works: a locating of self within a particular time, a network of streets; the steel and asphalt that support movement through the space are humble yet ubiquitous and powerful materials, they shape and underlie every passage.
Teresa Faris, Collaboration with a Bird V, #10, Sterling silver, wood altered by a bird, 7″ x 3″ x 1′ (pendant), 2017
Faris explores not a physical site but instead an emotional landscape. She finds meaning in intricate labor: crafting chains, sawing, riveting, and punching to create a calming, meditative space. In her work, the artist’s repetitive motions are related to the chewing and carving activity of a captive animal, specifically, the cockatoo who shares her home. Incorporating the brightly colored chews into elaborately sawn metalwork, Faris makes Collaborations with Bird, a series of works that pairs the productive output of co-located beings. Anxieties about personal well-being are considered in human and animal terms, equated, and found to be analogous in expression.
A similar focus on repeated actions is evident in a more recent series, CWaB:Lien. Exploring ancestral debt and assimilation, these works are punched and dapped, then soldered together into large swaths of small circular forms. The end result is stunning: glittering, seemingly cohesive silver bits connected into what appear to be sturdy medallions. But are they solid? What is behind that process of connection, integration, of piecing together, of fitting in? What is omitted in the creation of a homogenous group? What, if we consider our debts, is our inherited legacy?
Teresa Faris, CWaB:Lien #1, Sterling silver, reclaimed Comfy Perch™ 6″ x 3″ x 1″ (pendant), 2018
It is this focus on the overlooked or unconsidered that connects the work of Thomloudis, Furuhashi, and–although not part of the Shelter exhibtion–Faris. All three artists utilize jewelry to refocus attention, to turn away from decoration towards more complex considerations. Not items merely to be worn, the pieces are meaningful because of their external referents–they are visually arresting and conceptually weighty. These metal and wood constructions relocate the wearer: we are moved away from surface beauty to a place where personal adornment becomes a powerful intellectual presence that conveys astonishing expressive potential.
Teresa Faris pendant
(update: listen to an interview with me about the Shelter exhibition that aired on Sunday Afternoon Live, December 1, 2018).
(update 2: see a blogpost on the textiles in the Shelter exhibition, on the Chazen Museum of Art website).
Michael Lucero (Art, 1976, a solid ten years before me, Art, 1986) lives in Tennessee. His art-making has taken him from California and undergraduate studies at HSU to an MFA at the University of Washington. He has lived in New York and Italy, and has taught as a visiting professor throughout the United States, such as a 1989 summer arts program at HSU (I attended the summer 1988 session, missing Michael’s stint by one year). His ceramic work was featured in a 1996 retrospective exhibition organized by the Mint Museum that traveled to four venues, including the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art.
Michael was in Madison to install a body of early work in the Chazen’s 5,000 square foot Rowland Galleries. During the installation we had a chance to talk about Humboldt and studying art. I was so pleased to learn that he remembered people I studied with at HSU: Ron Johnson in art history, and Mort Scott who taught sculpture. Michael also had many stories about his experiences in the galleries of New York and his friendships with well-known artists, teachers, and dealers.
During the week we worked with the Chazen preparators to install 17 wire and wood hanging figures, made in 1978-79 after the artist first moved to New York. The works were on loan from a private collector, and two museums that received part of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: New Jersey’s Montclair Art Museum, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.
Michael Lucero Installation, Chazen Museum of Art, 2013
Reaching 8-13 feet in height, the figures are simultaneously fragile and imposing. Hovering just a few inches from the floor, they hung still when the gallery was empty, but they moved gently, responding to subtle air movement, even when anyone entered the room. They towered over whoever stood near, yet provided a chance for close investigation of their component parts: broken wood, crayon and paint, wire, mop handles, and broken furniture scavenged from the streets of the city.
The artist created new drawings for the exhibition, using sponges, fly swatters, shoes, toilet paper rolls, and foam noodles to stamp images onto cardboard, making bold, weighty figures that reference the hanging sculptures. He was also inspired by the gallery space, at the last minute adding a new work to the exhibition: two monumental figures stamped directly onto a large gallery door that had been painted to mimic the cardboard of the drawings. At first seeming so large, the drawings on cardboard were dwarfed by the newly painted wall figures, yet their textured surfaces demanded close looking. This was an installation both overwhelming and intimate, it played with scale and had so much to experience: subtle movement, shifting light, interesting textures, and spatial displacement.
Michael Lucero Installation, Chazen Museum of Art, 2013
In the re-purposed wood and furniture fragments, in the drawings made from available materials, is Humboldt evident in this work, or is it all New York City? In the quiet of the towering figures with their slight movements, walking among them all that is missing is the sound of water dripping into the ferns on the floor of the redwood forest. Maybe, or not. But it was fun, for one week in 2013, to conjure a connection between Arcata and NYC, to swap art world stories with another far-flung HSU alum, and participate in the installation and documentation of a truly wonderful body of work.
Ann Sinfield: Projects 