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Earth Voice (10 Artists)
Contemporary Art Workshop "Earth Voice." On first seeing the title of the new exhibition at the Contemporary Art Workshop, Chicago, the question falls to mind: is there such a voice? The nature of that voice quickly becomes evident. It is tactile, in form and space; and visual, in colors and forms. It is the voice focused through human creatures fully aware, if but for a moment, of the world on which they live: artists. "Earth Voice" will be open to all through April 11, 2000 at Chicago's Contemporary Art Workshop. "Earth Voice" features the paintings, sculptures and assemblages of ten Chicago artists: Ina Beierle, Bill Boyce, Frank Dina, Carrie Eizik, Analisa Leppanen, Joe McIIhany. Jean Poklop, Barbara Schnell, Marianne Taylor and Maureen Warren. Spirit Box With Flower on Top, a mixed media work by Ina Greenfield Beierle exemplifies the theme, and much of the approach, of "Earth Voice." Whatever one's preconceptions, deeply-held beliefs or aesthetic preferences -- the baggage everyone carries to any art exhibition -- Beierle's pieces are striking, engaging... winning. Her works immediately declare a material presence: limbs and twigs, husks and cones, laboriously gathered, sifted and assembled into boxes, mounts, taborets: objects of spirit. Luna Font is a small taboret-like form, with a level, top surface of silvered glass shards, mosaicized beneath a protective glass cover. Whether a lunar effect captured in diminutive taboret, or a mosaic of framed minnow flashes on a pedestal, it is a curious delight. Spirit Box frozen in Time, another mixed media piece by Beierle, raises the question of whether her art object is frozen in time, or rather stands outside of time. Carl G. Jung in The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature (1966) commented: "Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring." Beierle, indeed, captures a seminal theme of "Earth Voice": the search for universals in nature which have stood throughout time and apart from it. Various expressions of Shamanism, from Africa to the New World, have held that essences, benevolent as well as malicious, may be drawn to sites and objects, enlisted for personal benefit or as allies against misfortune. It is a way in which the human psyche comprehends and coexists in a world it did not call forth, but deeply felt. D.H. Lawrence was drawn to the Etruscans, divining that in their understanding "...all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world. The whole thing was alive, and had a great soul, or anima; and in spite of one great soul, there were myriad roving, lesser souls; every man, every creature and tree and lake and mountain and stream was animate, and had its own peculiar consciousness." (The Complete Poems of D.H.Lawrence, Penguin: 1977) Beierle's mixed media works resonate to that consciousness, that voice; an Earth Voice.
Jean Poklop's art is much exhibited, and she is also a frequent artist at E.G.G. Gallery. In The Spinners, a bright contrast of foliage and cobwebs, the eyes hidden in the brush at the upper left emerge upon careful viewing, subtle, but unexplained. Many of Poklop's canvases were reviewed in ArtScope.net as part of the show, "Through The Portals" (Oct. 23, 1998). Among the pieces in "Earth Voice," Lightening's Child is a newer offering, inspired by a lightening-struck tree which had healed and grown about its wounds, creating a unique form in natural response to living necessity. Poklop here captures a vegetable sentience in the angular and asymmetrically coherent deployment of limb and leaf. A smaller square within the image focuses and frames the phenomenon, isolating it as if for another time and space. The subject is not the pure 'invention' of the artist, neither is it articulate before the artist perceives and binds it to enduring image. This forms much of the impetus of "Earth Voice" as an exhibition: artists perceive a primordial living pulse, an ecology, and, each in their own individual manner, channel its voice. Much of Poklop's art exemplifies visually, what R.W. Emerson noted philosophically: "Behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present...it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, through ourselves: therefore that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old." ("Spirit": [1836]; Beacon Press: 1991). This impulse is what unifies a diverse array of art.
Maureen Warren is also featured in Au Printemps!, March 10 through June 18, at the CCT Gallery, Evanston Hall, NU Settlement, 1400 West Augusta Boulevard, Chicago 60622, (773/ 278-7471, ext.152). Warren's oil on canvas, Indian Corn (1998: 56"x70"), displays a quilt-like format of variegated painted squares, each with an arrangement of multicolored cobs; each square coordinated with the its adjacent focal elements. The four crow panels in series, fledglings against a red ground, impart a clever, if not mischievous spirit to the birds. It is easy to anthropomorphize -- it is human; but in Warren's oils that must come as a response from the viewer. Maureen Warren captures the spirit of creatures and material objects, in dimension and in the moment, each individual idiosyncrasy; and precisely because of this the specific nature, the crow nature of crows in the case in point, is brought to the focused eye, however our thoughts may afterwards rationalize it. Warren is an artist much attuned to quickening pulses, an elan vital, inherent in the natural forms and textures of the earth.
Carrie Eizik's acrylics display a more conceptualized approach to painting: a deliberative contemplation of her subject. The artist's goal of expression; while less 'automatic' and immediately intuitive, is provocative. Woman on the Couch (1998) is a set of sequential poses and the almost cinematic alternation of color in the composite's panels, magenta, cyan, quasi-sepias, creates a striking impression. Several film-makers have solarized, inverted color, or alternated black & white with color footage to create an analogous effect, but here the artist plays with the viewer's perception in what are, after all, fixed images. Woman on the Couch captures the illusion of time passing, but allows the viewer to closely inspect that sensation. If it is true that the artist can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, i.e. make us really see what is about us, as if for the first time, then Eizik succeeds. Again, we question if when we do not hear an 'Earth Voice' it is because we do not stop and take the time to seek it out and actively listen. In Person (1995), human figurations aggregate into the framing contour of a central keyhole form. Here, the viewer confronts the concept, prior to the perceptual experience. In a similar vein, Adolescent (1993) by Caroline Palmer, exhibits animation of the window view in panel fretting. The works of Eizik and Palmer here present more of a formalist approach, than a strictly intuitive working, but they awaken a new perspective on the phenomena which surround us. In Equinox, by Marianne Taylor-Lipannen, spikes of parallel roundels fashioned from thorns enring a tarred, animal skull; all on a pedestal of thorn twigs. Equinox is particularly noteworthy -- a skeletal fulcrum forms the center of vegetative material, dynamically arraigned. The attentive viewer discerns the both focus and the aggregating hierarchy. The work implies a process captured in a single instant. In collaboration with Marianne Taylor is Analisa Lipannen-Taylor's A Boundless Mind (AD 2000). In this piece, an animal skull rests in an escutcheon of verdant leaves, all in a black frame, with renaissance-flueroned corners. It is a piece which brings together origin and end -- the animal death which brings forth the plant which nourishes again the animal. Bill Boyce is represented by four pieces in this show. Much of his work centers on found materials; a recycling, so to speak, of twentieth century discards into sculptural art. Untitled, 2000, however, seems a contemporary fossilization in cement. Much of the work of Boyce emerges from the associations suggested by the found materials, but the results are far from random. Carl G. Jung noted in "The Transcendent Function" ([1916] 1957): "Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain." Boyce is one of an increasing number of artists who have come to recycling 'found objects' into art. Boyce does so with conscious intent, and not mere aesthetic preference. Suzi Gablik, in her book, The Reenchantment of Art (Thames and Hudson: 1998), quotes Santa Barbara artist, Ciel Bergman: "Art may not change anything, but the ideas we have about ourselves we project into the world.... Negative images have a way of coming alive just as positive images have." Boyce aims at technological waste and contemporary arrogance against the environment. He is seeking out a means to recycle technology into a new culture, and in a more overt and synthetic manner, his work reveals inspirational affinities with Joseph McIlhany.
The sculptures of Joseph McIlhany are compositions fashioned from natural specimens and found artifacts. McIlhany's work offers aesthetic pleasure, but it also illustrates an aspect of art which is vital to contemporary approach and practice, namely, the interplay between an artist's initial perceptions and his media. Earlier art traditions have held that each medium has unique strengths and unique failings, and this is usually the case. However, recent decades of art ideology and 'meta-art' theory, as well as the synasthesic mixing of media often have created the belief that art is transferable, i.e. that it stands unbound to the materials of its expression. McIlhany gathers diverse materials: braided copper cable, wood blocks and tree limbs; odds and ends and flotsam from nature and the hand of man. Some of it is chosen with a goal in mind; and as often the objects themselves suggest the result achieved through the artist as a vehicle of perceptions both ambient and personal. The art and the object are inseparable, and yet the specific character of each element, wood, metal, stone, retains its nature and material traits. They harmonize and constitute the art object, rather than merely express an art concept. None would work its effect if it were, say, cast as duplicate in metal or poured in mold. This highlights a strength to much of the "Earth Voice" exhibition. The artists are sowing fertile ground. In The Gardener, McIlhany offers a wooden pillar, on the sides of which insertions represent various seeds. The base, an etching plate sporting leaf motifs, recalls mulch. McIlhany's work incorporates copper cable strands, flattened at the ends. The artist noted of his vegetative representation that flattening copper is also a way "to release any ambient frustrations." Additional sculptures of Joseph McIlhany are on display at Gallery 2828 (2828 N. Milwaukee Ave; Tel: 773/489-6617) until March 26th. Frank Dina is represented by four color photographs which center upon the moods of change. These are very well executed foci on light and contour: Ice in Montrose Harbor (1996) and Rusty Wall (1998) are particularly fine examples of genius locii, the spirit of place. Barbara Schnell's previous work was reviewed in ArtScope.net ("Through The Portals," Oct. 23, 1998), and in "Earth Voice," Schnell furthers those achievements. Again, in a society which values speed and activity over meditation and empathy, Schnell's five mixed media assemblages bring an awareness of time, a distancing of the present as if it were the past, so that beyond all creative exploration, one returns to understand the immediate time and material for the first time: an archeology of the present. Her Ancient Relics#I and Ancient Relics#II, and Serendipity (1998) are particularly engaging. The curious visitor may approach "Earth Voice," with the theories of psychology, sociology or philosophy in mind, but the immediate and most important response is visual and visceral. In this, Carl G. Jung made a valid point: Reverence for the great mysteries of nature, which the language of religion seeks to express in symbols hallowed by their antiquity, profound significance, and beauty, will not suffer from the extension of psychology to this domain, to which science has hitherto found no access. We only shift the symbols back a little...but without succumbing to the erroneous notion that we have created more than merely a new symbol for the same enigma that perplexed all ages before us.It is the viewer's own involvement which is paramount, both in the visual experience, and in the implications of the viewer's connectivity with the themes touched upon in "Earth Voice." Here, "Earth Voice" belongs not just to the artists, but to all. And again, Carl G. Jung's observations come to mind:(Psychological Types: 1921) Re-immersion in the state of participation mystique is the secret of artistic creation and of the effect which great art has upon us, for at that level of experience it is no longer the weal or woe of the individual that counts, but the life of the collective.One may analyze the works, and perhaps the various artists, but ultimately their theme is felt, sung, not essayed in logical constructs. The American philosopher, William James, summed this show precisely:(The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature: 1966). The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. ... Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but a showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.First the voice, "Earth Voice" -- the afterthought is the lesser. "Earth Voice" runs through April 11, 2000 at Chicago's Contemporary Art Workshop -- ten Chicago artists: Ina Beierle, Bill Boyce, Frank Dina, Carrie Eizik, Analisa Leppanen, Joe McIIhany. Jean Poklop, Barbara Schnell, Marianne Taylor and Maureen Warren. It is worth attending. Editors Note: The quotations of C.G.Jung may be found in Carl G. Jung, Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings: 1905-1961, (Bollingen Series XXXI, Princeton University Press: 1978) --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. |
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