516 gussies itself up in Unraveling Tradition and Restoration

Albuquerque Alibi, July 15, 2010

By Patricia Sauthoff

“Lure/Forest,” Beili Liu

Yelizaveta Nersesova and I sit on the floor in front of her installation “A Rare Perfection of Form” for 516 ARTS’ upcoming show, Unraveling Tradition. The work is a hot-pink painted log balanced precariously on the ground. Green and yellow and blue thread encases a hook in the wood, connecting it to the wall, where the thread wraps around pins in an interwoven design. Looking at it, I’m overtaken by a sense of déjà vu.

“Thread is hard to work with,” Nersesova says, “it responds to your state. It’s volatile that way.”

A few minutes earlier, I’d noticed the thread vibrating in response to movement in the building. At first I’d thought of a musical instrument, but the temperamental nature she describes brings something wholly different to mind. Suddenly, I want to interact with her work—not to touch it, but to explore the three-dimensionality of it. There’s a cone within another, neither completely closed, at least not in the unfinished version. I want to stick my head inside and see what all that thread looks like as it returns to its single point on the hook. It’s reminicient of Anthony McCall’s 1973 experimental film “Line Describing a Cone,” except that McCall’s film is made of light and smoke and this is made of something tactile. McCall’s film though, which I was lucky enough to see in person once, actually seems more touchable. There’s no way to destroy “Cone,” which makes it simultaneously seem both more and less real than Nersesova’s.

These are shows that not only play with textiles but with the idea of tactility. By using materials with which the audience is familiar but placing them at a distance and in a relationship with fine art, the work of the combined 22 artists becomes alien and unfamiliar—things that are not to be handled; things that are delicate.

Because the work in Unraveling Tradition is made of fibers, materials normally touched and used, I want to lay my hands on everything. From the felt forests of Lisa Kellner’s “Almost Perfect” and “Life Support”—which remind me of another piece, Christine Margaret Wertheim’s “The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef,” though made through a different technique—to the seagrass, beeswax and rawhide weaving of Sarah Hewitt’s “Beloved,” my body wants to experience them with more than just my eyes.

“I love to pet them,” Hewitt says of her work. Further reinforcing my desire to explore everything in sight she says, “Almost all my pieces have some kind of smell.”

I’d noticed it, too, when we passed Hewitt’s woven sculpture, but I resisted and, because it’s what I have to do, will continue to resist.

Unraveling Tradition shares its opening and its venue with a sister show, filled with artists who also know just what I’m talking about. Restoration features art made by textile conservators and restorers. These are people who spend their days intimately involved with delicate fabrics and, when the workday is over, unleash their creative spirits.

In her works “Three Cut Purple,” “White Velvet Flowers” and others, Ilona Pachler (who shows seven works in Restoration) first damages fabrics by cutting and burning, then conserves them in their state of intentional destruction, while Norma Cross weaves paper, filled with images of the effects of war, the way one would normally weave fabric for “Woven Paper Number One.”

Restoration curator Rufus Cohen went into the show seeking tension. “One of the inherent contradictions is that it features work by artists, but those artists are defined by their jobs” as restorers and conservators, he says. It’s an unusual focus, but one that Cohen says artists welcomed because “they’re so immersed in traditional models that they need to explore something further.”

Both Unraveling and Restoration open Saturday, July 17, and share the space—Unraveling downstairs, Restoration upstairs—at 516 ARTS. During the run of the show, through Sept. 11, an installation by Unraveling artist Ellen Rothenberg expands beyond gallery walls onto D-RIDE buses. These small works utilize the buses’ advertising space and offer riders an opportunity to see art outside the art world context.

These are shows that not only play with textiles but with the idea of tactility. By using materials with which the audience is familiar but placing them at a distance and in a relationship with fine art, the work of the combined 22 artists becomes alien and unfamiliar—things that are not to be handled; things that are delicate. The juxtaposition draws the viewer in further than if the works were more traditional because they tease us with a sense of the ordinary while being nothing of the kind.

Unraveling Tradition and Restoration
Runs through Sept. 11
Reception: Saturday, July 17, 6 to 8 p.m.
516 ARTS
516 Central SW
516arts.org

Sarah Hewitt sculpts a fine mess

By Marin Sardy

Sarah Hewitt undermines gender prejudices naturally.

I once knew a guy who, when he was on LSD, couldn’t handle being in nature. All that exaggeratedly twining, entangling growth was just too creepy for him, so he only took the drug in visually sanitized city spots, surrounded by concrete and steel. Although I found him absurd, as a biology student I had seen enough of the unsettling and uncontrollable messiness of life that I got his point. Now I’m reminded of it when I look at the sculptures of local fiber artist Sarah Hewitt.

Hewitt’s heavily textured abstract forms, on display in the two-artist show Lost & Found at Victoria Price Art & Design, feel viscerally alive in ways we usually prefer to forget. Composed of wax and grass-like raffia—and vaguely resembling body parts, plant parts or unicellular blobs—the sculptures suggest breaches of their own limits. At once foreign and familiar, they’re as beguiling as they are disturbing—because they are disturbing. Hewitt’s waxy coatings appear membranous, her structural folds look vaginal, grassy openings suggest nests and elongated shapes recall standing figures. There’s also a hint of violence in the deep red dyes and misshapen bends.

These forms are somehow human, yet invertebrate enough to make humans recoil—a reminder of how strongly we have historically tried to define ourselves as separate from animal. Even the most ardent tree huggers can rarely resist Disney-vision: the urge to tidy up nature, either aesthetically or structurally, so it makes more sense. But as Hewitt’s work announces, that’s just not the nature of nature.

Tying together sex, reproduction and the female body—literally—a sculpture titled “Umbilicus” has a heavily folded, basket-like construction hanging like a boulder from the ceiling in a cage of red rope. The message, perhaps: Without connection to the mother, we would be in a free fall. Nearby, the droopy, blood-red floor sculpture of waxed canvas and grass titled “Mistress” is nearly painful to observe. Suggesting both boldness and injury, the spade-shaped form’s gruesomely slumping lobes reach up to a prickly phallic appendage that tops it like a cap, enfolding emotional import into the body of fabric in ways I’ve never seen. Hewitt is like Louise Bourgeois with organic materials.

Beside these absorbing amalgams, Nancy Hidding Pollock’s cairn-shaped assemblages come off as amateur and facile. At first, I took her stacked sheet-metal ovals to be just glorified interior decoration. To be that, however, they would have to be decorative. Instead, with neither cohesion nor punch and lacking the subtle visual sensibility that separates good design from bad, the result is awkward and not engaging.

It’s much more rewarding to compare Hewitt to another female artist with sculpture showing in Santa Fe: Judy Chicago. The mother of feminist art, Chicago is world-famous, but her strength has always been her weirdly cerebral social gutsiness more than her artistic acumen. In The Toby Heads, a series of cast-glass busts and porcelain goblets made from a single model, Chicago attempts to usurp and reconfigure “masculine” media like auto-body painting. But her work has a way of not quite aligning with her vision of how it challenges prevailing attitudes. It comes off instead as either too straightforward or out of sync.

The pieces work best when Toby’s elderly androgyny and mournfully downcast gaze, exaggerated by her bald head and the work’s high-gloss finish, offer a touching look at human frailty. More often, the brightly colored translucent glass renders Toby clownish, like a caricature of an aging transvestite. Cups lining the walls portray her in even more extreme-seeming parody, with her painted two-sided faces gaping absurdly. Rather than building to something grander, the work’s incongruities just seem incongruent. So as hard as Chicago tries to undermine gender-based prejudices in the art world, it’s Hewitt who actually succeeds.

Buster came to me in the Spring of 1996 and never left my side. This morning I had to release Boo from the confines of his little bear body. He’s the kindest creature I’ve ever known.

Fourteen years ago I moved back to New Mexico after school. On Good Friday a caravan of trucks and cars holding my belongings and animals arrived in Truchas, NM, very late in the night. I had never witnessed the procession to Chimayo before and that night as I approached my new home in a high mountain village I unknowingly and ignorantly joined the procession.

Last week  I moved once again. This time back into Santa Fe, right downtown. It’s been years since I’ve lived in a “city-like” atmosphere. Last night I was reminded of my pilgrimage many years back…On the eve of Easter as I prepared for bed I heard the Cathedral’s bells begin to ring. My thoughts from last night follow.

Listening to the Cathedral bells ringing, clamoring; they are disarmingly passionate. It reminds me of my first Easter in Truchas. Now in the city, the Cathedral bells ring out. In Truchas the Penitentes will mourn beautifully - whispering in the wind. This move has been tougher than I imagined but the notes in the air remind me of new beginnings to come and bring some closure of the past.