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Autumn Hymn: A Celebration
of Autumn Equinox:
Gallery E.G.G. EQUINOX -- "Equal Night." English uses the Latin word, but it held a strong significance among all peoples long before Rome was even founded. In the Northern hemisphere, it meant the end of summer and growth; an end to light and warmth. It signaled resting, and, where winters were fierce, even hardship. It was a time to celebrate the goodness of sun and the giving earth. Gallery E.G.G. began its current exhibition, "Autumn Hymn: A Celebration of Autumn Equinox," on October 29th and it celebrates the work of four young artists: Stephanie Rose Bird, Jennifer Jarrell, Chun Hui Pak, and Ane Taleva. E.G.G. -- for Earth Goddess Gallery -- promotes art that is meant "to re-enchant our environment and our lives by promoting an attitude of guardianship towards the Earth, as we struggle to maintain a sense of spirituality amid a technological environment." Stephanie Rose BirdThe art of Stephanie Rose Bird is very much in accord with Gallery E.G.G.'s mission. Bird works on handmade paper which she casts from a wide range of natural materials, often using even small twigs from her yard. In many of her paintings this gives the impression that the artifacts of nature have willfully combined to provide a painting surface, and that image and material form a single unity. In style and composition, her painted images often evoke the pictographic symbolism which many today associate with aboriginal cosmographies and world-views: Ariege, Lascaux, Altamira. She displays a sophistication of image akin to what the Post-Impressionists drew from neolithic and 'primitive' art. But, like the Jungians, and artists such as Kandinsky and Klee, her thematic concerns lie very much in contemporary alternative spiritualities.
The Devil is Busy (1999: mixed media on gladiola paper with pine needles and cedar) is painted on a circular sheet of handmade paper, which somewhat resembles a hand-held shield. Bird's palette is subdued, gentle, but ranges through a full spectrum. One of the most evident features of the composition is the use of frequently intersecting curved lines, almost a batik or stained glass manner of working image elements into a whole. This gives the work liveliness -- motion; and at the same time it helps to clarify the individual entities entwined before the viewer. Bird spoke of her intent to express struggle between opposites, good and evil, the shadow that light inevitably casts, the act that must call into being re-action. Indeed, an approach, or rather a process, which pervades Bird's art is her strong awareness of dynamic totality arising from sundered images and divided acts. Light does not create shadow, any more than light creates light. Light and shadow, and color, are manifest. Images, like words, stop, capture, restrict for the mind that which is an ever moving, interwoven and unknowable process. Her handmade paper, integral to her image, often contributes to its formation. And the image itself unites its visual themes, while preserving the integrity of each. Subject and object are one: continually recurring templates in time. To ask whether her medium reflects or leads to her results, is to ask whether a seed 'causes' a tree, or if paintings are 'caused' by painters. Stephanie Rose Bird's art defies the old Scholastic cleavage into Natura Naturata (Nature 'Natured' -- object) and Natura Naturans (Nature 'naturing' -- an act of being). Night and Day show themselves equal at 'Equinox,' twice each year; neither is 'caused' by the other: both reveal a greater single and natural truth. Writer Joseph Campbell could well have been speaking of Bird's art, and Gallery E.G.G. itself when he observed: "The spirit is really the bouquet of life. It is not something breathed into life, it comes out of life. This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn't something ruling over and above a fallen nature." (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth [With Bill Moyers]: Doubleday: 1988) Soul to Soul (1999: ink, acrylic on hemp/vegetable/gladiola paper) is painted in a subdued, limited palette and the hues are earthen, somewhat as in natural dyes. But its composition and execution are cognate to The Devil is Busy. Here, her primary theme centered upon the idea of sacrifice, not of blood, but of love. While indeed drawing upon some of the ideas of ritual sacrifice, she sought more intently to evoke the giving of oneself as exemplified in a mother's devotion to her child. Part of her inspiration lies in the reality that many times an individual will more readily die for love than suffer to live contrary to it. As Joseph Campbell noted, the soul grows out of life and in doing so it reaches out to the other in its life: it grows beyond mere life. Bird's title for the piece is apt -- Soul to Soul. Growing beyond life, as Bird's painting indicates, often demands sacrifice for life and to life. Campbell notes in the same volume: "Motherhood is sacrifice. ... That is why the mother becomes the symbol of Mother Earth. She is the one who has given birth to us and on whom we live and on whose body we find our food." Bird's art is not only visually stimulating, it is consistent in its underlying mythos. That is gratifying, and much welcome in current art. 'Ready to wear answers,' 'easy outs,' are what modern rationalism and technology has too often offered humanity, bringing nothing natural into being, and making no living thing joyous of its life.
In general, many of Stephenie Rose Bird's works do bring to mind Georges Rouault and Altamira. One finds in them the awareness of contour and discipline of defining mass and form which Rouault drew from his earlier work with stained glass. There is the iconic reduction of visual motif toward a formal, partially stylized form fitted into a deliberative composition. Unlike the representative fauves, the color palette is subdued: contour and form -- mass -- take precedence over hue. Bird's Evolution of Monsters, (1999: Sumi Ink, Crushed Oyster Shells, Earth Pigments, Cuttlefish Ink, Bistre on Paper: 7.5"x11") best exemplifies this aspect of her art, and from that point, she often tends toward a freer play of working her pigments, ink, bistre and applied materials such as crushed oyster shell. This uninhibited, more abstractionist treatment is evident in works such as The Birth of Legend (Earth Pigments, Sumi and Cuttlefish Ink,Crushed Oyster shells and Bister on paper). Her thematic motifs most link the art to neolithic evocations. They are unmitigated by rational conceptualization or theological intercessions. Stephanie Rose Bird's art is an art of belief, intuitions, direct observation and interpretation. Her art does not split hairs over whether seed "causes" trees or trees precede seed: it harmonizes human feeling, and conscious perception, within an ecology of plant, animal and much else beyond. Bird's own experimentation with casting untraditional papers, and exploring new or alternative pigments -- natural dyes and stains, native paper tones -- highlights her awareness of the materials aesthetically and spiritually linked to her art's content. If one defines the natural to include the human creature, hers is a natural art using overtly natural materials -- twigs and material roughness and tones -- a bit of the urban yard and the primeval forest that 'sits well' within walls. Beyond the harmony between media and image, her exploration of alternative art materials expands the repetoire for object art: once she discovers or develops a material vocabulary, it is a stimulus for other artworks.
Shifters, (1999: Inks & Acrylic on Algae Paper: 7.5"x11.5") seems appropriate to a modern exhibition and yet might equally have illuminated a desert cave millennia ago. Soul to Soul brings humankind back into an awareness that it is a part of the natural order; and that as such it feels, as well as contemplates that truth. There is a breath of the feral -- nature 'naturing.' And Bird's art, for a moment, stops, captures and restricts the motions of a natural world in order that the human mind may grasp it, and the eye revel in it. Over eleven works by Stepanie Rose Bird at Gallery E.G.G. offer much for contemplation and delight. They are a Modern's re-examination of the elemental -- human and in Nature. It is an art engaging in content, expression and media. Stephanie Bird holds a BFA cum laude from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and received her MFA from the University of California at San Diego. Editor's Note: Many of the books cited in www.artscope.net reviews may be purchased through this website's link to Barnes & Noble Books. --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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