"home" exhibition at PAFA: a review by Jenna Buckingham

Getting Home

Hacking into art criticism with a focus on PAFA’s newest contemporary exhibit entitled “here.”

In the spirit of artist and writer John Kelsey’s, “The Hack”, and of the show that is the catalyst for this essay, I am exploring the idea of home, from a subjective and sentimental viewpoint: my own broken sense of identity and belonging.

“here.” brings together artists from 5 different major regions, the Southwest, the Midwest, Texas, the mid-Atlantic and the Southeast. Each artist or collective explores their own regionalism and how it defines and nourishes their practice. In an increasingly globalized world, the show suggests, home, the place where one belongs, becomes more coveted than ever. I really enjoy the way that the artists bring a sense of warmth and play to their exhibits. They take advantage of the idea that their work is not judged based on the precedence set by New York “salon” as it were, but by the standards that they themselves create and define. The result for the viewer is feeling simultaneously alienated from and in kinship with their work. Each of the works represents the artist’s environment or regional culture in which the come from. Though I was not able to directly relate to much of the imagery, never-the-less it was presented in such a way to enable me to connect to the work in some ways. This is sometimes portrayed with the aesthetic harmony of the piece, as in Aaron Rothman’s digital paintings of desert vegetation and Scott Hocking’s gorgeous photographs of abandoned sites in Detroit. Sometimes there is a sense of nostalgia such as the Americana familiarity of Erika Nelson’s “World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things”, that is pervasive in the exhibit. The artists are able to observe and comment on their cultural surroundings while simultaneously participating and become shaped by their location.

My personal experience with location and home has indeed been tumultuous and I feel that the artists in the show were grappling with the idea of belonging and physical place. I felt a kinship with the journey of their works and felt, both culturally and personally oriented for a moment while I experienced the exhibit. I found that no matter where the artists were from, where they have been, how much or how widely they’ve traveled, they all felt home in the same way. All of us have to learn to carry our homes turtle-like on our backs, so that we can maintain footing while the ground moves beneath us.
I am “the perpetually unseen protagonist in my work.” This thought, presented by Abigail Anne Newbold in regards to her “Homemaker Series” was, in the interpretation of Roland Barthes, the punctum of the show for me. That is, a personal connection that transforms the whole relationship between the viewer and the work. Newbold’s installation consisted of a wall painted gray with several hooks and hanging apparatus supporting various outdoor survival provisions, both modern and primitive. All of the items were either found or made by the artist and color coordinated by looped string for packing into a knapsack which also hung empty on the wall. Larger supplies consisted of a hand-altered sleeping bag and a waterproof jumpsuit with the artist’s initials on it. In front of the wall was a nineteenth century wagon with high-tech waterproof fiber cover in place of canvas. Next to that is a modern, one-person synthetic waterproof tent and finally, a meticulously designed antique-style woodworking bench. She had made herself a survival kit.
She is the explorer and her wilderness is her life. She has laid out her provisions as in a well organized shed might be containing objects that seem to be made for a prolonged nomadic exploration. However, the fact that she was not performing – not there putting on the suit and cooking with the supplies and coming in and out of the wagon or the tent, gave me the impression that while these objects are organized on the wall, she is settling somewhere nearby in an established dwelling. I envision that when the exhibit comes down, she will take up these things again, putting them all into a knapsack, and pick up her wagon for a new destination. The care taken with her piece leads me to  believe that this character is happy in her existence. Each item has been exquisitely designed and purposefully placed. The aesthetic consistency of the items as a group serves to define a chosen place of belonging but there too is an aspect of sadness, that for me, is the main driving force for the work: Everything is made for only one person and her individual needs for survival through solitary travel. The work also reminds me of a commercial line of outdoor gear, designed to entice customers to buy into a lifestyle. It’s not just about sport or recreation, there’s a certain image to live up to. It seems like just another way to get ahead. One can surround themselves with the latest and greatest items in the market, but still end up in a one-person tent alone at night. I think of the ways that we isolate ourselves in this busy, crowded world. We build barriers surrounding us and set up defenses against the terrifying prospect of that relentless threat - other people.

“Homemaker Series” illustrates this estrangement beautifully. I imagine the explorer protagonist and I root for her in her plight, much the same as I am rooting for and encouraging myself through the challenges and hardships of life. I think that when we can recognize that we are all on the same journey, dealing with the same fears and challenges, no matter our individual experiences, this recognition brings us together. There are things in this world that are truly worth being frightened of and that we must wage war against. It is only in our isolation from each other that we are defenseless against these true monsters. 

Jenna Buckingham is a first year Masters of Fine Arts student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Around and Within: Installations by Kristin Kozlowski and Sandra Gonzalez

Masters candidates at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts are given the opportunity to utilize specially delegated studios as installation rooms.  This is an exciting part of the PAFA curriculum as it allows students a chance to explore wider physical and temporal issues in their work and engage their colleagues in a different sort of discourse.

Second year MFA Kristin Kozlowski and first year MFA Sandra Gonzalez are the latest in this installation schedule.  Drastically distinct from one another in their particular narratives and material insights, they do share a common thread of commentary on the architecture around human beings; Sandra's is invested in a metaphorical architecture of memory and psychological spaces, while Kristin's directly engages the physical structures of the labyrinth neighborhoods we inhabit. 

Sandra's space, which she titled "The Persistence of Memory" is driven most by her personal connection with family and home.  She lived in Tamaulipas, Mexico until she was 14, when her family moved to Texas.  The displacement of home, what was then versus what has become, resonates in the raw, fading imagery of self and family portraiture.  The active premise of her show, however, is that we are privileged only so much visual recollection.  We have to write it down in order to retain it. Or do we?  She encourages us to share a memory of our own on pieces of rice paper that she adhered to a pillar and which we may or may not fold up and put inside hollow clocks hung in the space.  Our secrets are out, and one labors a bit in choosing which memory is the most 'cherished'.  Intentionally or not, Sandra has created a latent tension in this opportunity; after all, she will conceivably read all these notes.  How will she deal with the aftermath of this?  How could our memories mean anything to her?  There is something poignant and defeating in the re-reading of an anonymously written memory, and I hope this is something she considers for future work.

Walking into her installation, I was struck by how sparse it was.  We have to ask how can one portray an essence of memory in a visual installation?  At a first glance, Sandra's fairly conventional use of the space as a 'gallery space' is uncluttered; it seems almost too easy to be in, contrary to the way memory is constantly changing, never stagnant, and impossible to pin down.  To title one's work after one of the most recognizable paintings in the world (Dali's) is a loaded decision, but Dali's goal in his was to discredit the conditions of reality and reassert the unlikely 'reality' of the dream.  Sandra's installation affirms reality more than anything: she invites our immediate participation by writing on the papers.  The hanging clocks in her room, if they are in reference to Dali, are reverential but are at risk of becoming too literal.  The clocks point to the passing of time and are humorous if we read them as a kind of signifier of time, but can this be communicated in other ways?


Sandra uses words and images equally to talk about memory in her piece.  In "Ways of Seeing", author John Berger wrote "we only see what we look at.  To look is an act of choice...what we see is brought within our reach".  If this is true, can we say the inverse:  What we do not see is constantly escaping our reach?  A truly convincing visual commentary on memory can use this condition effectively.  By its nature, memory is always evading us.  It is never brought within reach; yet almost everything in Sandra's installation is.  However, Sandra does make our being explicit, and this is another quality of memory, since memory is always bound to a subject.  It always converges back to the one with the memory.  By being asked to write our memories down we are subjected to her eye.


There is also the issue of the photographs themselves, and we cannot get past Sandra's images without conjuring Roland Barthes'  reflections on photography in his book "Camera Lucida", in which he writes that "the return of the dead" is inherent in every photograph.  Her focus on her grandmother is in line with this and there is an uncanny moment that occurs when one's eye goes from the commercially manufactured clocks in the room to the image of the clock in the photograph of her grandmother.

   

A sense of anonymity is at play in Kristin's installation as well.  There are no signs in the world she has created; there is no language at all.  It is almost as if the space she is presenting is some alternate pre-lingual dimension.  But, Slavoj Zizek says in his film "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema", "We need the excuse of a fiction to stage what we truly are."  This is helpful in illuminating how Kristin's exhibit, as a fiction, immediately makes us subjects in it.  One of the central twists is in the basic fact of its condition: we step from the city of Philadelphia into an art school and into the 'sanctuary' of an art studio, only to find ourselves back within that cumbersome urban network once more.  This is very keen, but the one disruption to this quality is in the way Kristin leaves the back end of the studio fairly empty and unlit; we are directed into the other half of the room where the action is.  We can always keep one foot in and one foot out.

I see parallels with Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, a work about the psychological gulfs resulting from living in a world of rooms: one space separated from another space.  This is a problem for us, which Kristin highlights by making her structures so distant and fragmentary.  Made almost entirely in black tape which Kristin transforms into a semi illusionistic depiction of buildings, highways, steps and windows, the urban space is devoid of any literal human qualities.  We are strangers within a cold, surgically descriptive place.

By using cut tape, Kristin has all but eliminated the signs of her hand.  The preciousness of the artist-hand is undone.  It is rather in the referencing of our being within this world that the work takes shape.  The fragility of the tape speaks to Kristin's thoughtfulness on the ever present risk of being in a place that might suddenly all collapse.  We live within and depend on the foresight of engineers, architects and construction workers and rarely question it: our being within a space is inevitably just so; her installation engages this.  She expresses joy in disorienting the viewer and getting lost herself, and responds to the abandoned, uglier faces of Philadelphia.  Ending my talk with her, she voiced a desire to bring something playful out of the darker problems inherent in many American cities.  I look forward to seeing her do this and hope she critically engages the many facets of her project.

IN THEORY  will be here for the next series of MFA installations.  Do not forget to send ideas for other postings.  We encourage your submissions!

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland, 'Camera Lucida', Hill and Wang, 1980

Berger, John, 'Ways of Seeing', Penguin, 1972

Zizek, Slavoj, 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema', Dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2006

Inspired Noun of the Day

And the Inspired Noun goes to...

But wait.  How does one go about making the first selection from a virtually infinite source of historic figures and their cultural residue?  Surely this is a doomed exercise, a blatant avowal of personal preference- a conspiracy at best!

From the cave paintings at Lascaux

I can hear all those groans of resignation.  Here is why: this is the earliest drawing known to mankind, approximated at 17,300 years old and discovered - get this - by four teenagers.  The most important drawing in the history of the earth found out by a squad of pubescent twerps and their dog.  And here we are slaving over theses in a cold white square room, and there you are reading about this.  Existential...I told you this was the most fitting starting point!

Without Lascaux we do not have Picasso, Michelangelo, Pollack, maps, sketchbooks, advertising, and the entire history of art.  The global tradition of drawing from observation has claimed the soul of many an artist; using the mark as a metaphor for a human being's place in the world has shaped the evolution of our species.  The story of all art, if there is one, is the obsession with interpreting what we see.  It is the repetitive exercise of memory, as seeing is a continuous act of memorizing.  It all started on these caves.