Art
FIONA KINSELLA AND MARIAH JOHNSON: “GOOD HOUSEKEEPING”
Through March 18 at Ruby GreenAbout 35 years ago, women in increasing numbers started making art with a distinctively “female” character. One of them, Judy Chicago, is currently in Nashville as the Chancellor’s Artist in Residence at Vanderbilt. But what does it mean to say art has a “female character?” Feminist critic Lucy Lippard took at stab at describing the elements of the new art coming from women in the early ’70s. She saw overarching characteristics like a proclivity for fragmentation, repetition and autobiographical elements; more specific commonalities like the inclusion of certain images (she cited windows, flowers and animals); and the use of women’s techniques such as sewing, weaving and knitting. Domestic imagery—food, cooking, housekeeping—certainly formed a part of it. Thirty-five years on, these images provide less ground for surprise, and in fact make up staples of artistic imagery, just as Western art over the centuries has continually returned to portraits, still lifes, landscapes, cityscapes and seascapes.
The two artists in the current show at Ruby Green follow this path of women’s art with striking additions. Mariah Johnson, an Arkansan finishing an MFA at Illinois, makes sculptures from bed sheets, and Fiona Kinsella, a Canadian who appeared last summer in Zeitgeist’s “Eponymous” group show, constructs assemblages using eggs and wedding cakes.
Johnson’s chief works are the sculptures she makes from bed sheets sewn together, stacked, rolled and folded so their colors and patterns create three-dimensional abstract compositions. For the first work you encounter in the gallery, “Drink,” Johnson took sheets in a variety of green tones, draped some of them around the display pedestals for some of Kinsella’s pieces, then laid others flat on the floor to flow back into the main gallery, where they climb up onto a metal stool in a thick braid. Some of the sheets have floral patterns, some have stripes and others are plain-colored, resulting in a collage effect. She builds up the piece in places by rolling up pillowcases and inserting them into the folds of the fabric, creating small circular shapes, and she creates linear forms by stacking sheets or overlaying them so only an edge shows.
Johnson constructed one of her other pieces, “The Thin One,” primarily by neatly stacking folded sheets on a metal chair, with the bottom sheet unfolded to flow out onto the floor, and the top one flipping over the chair’s back. She chose sheets in various tones of white and blue, revealed in slivers where the sheets are tightly stacked. These repetitive lines in a muted range of colors recall the painter Agnes Martin, but with a soft texture that transforms abstract designs the way Claes Oldenburg’s sculptures transformed common objects.
Beyond their obvious compositional qualities, the sculptures evoke family life. Johnson buys her sheets from secondhand stores and yard sales, so someone once used them for the intimate activities that occur in bed—sleeping, having sex, recuperating from illness and dying. The specific family histories that played out on these sheets evaporated when they went into the secondhand market, but spectral reminders remain.
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For this show, Kinsella bases her assemblages on wedding cakes and duck eggs, which she breaks and violates with foreign elements such as fur, photos, animal claws, push pins and scissors. She encloses each item in a box with a glass top or front, and wraps parts of the piece in shrink-wrap, both steps a person would take to preserve the objects.
In a series called “The Patron Saint of Housekeeping (St. Martha),” four square, white wedding cakes with frilly frosting sit in a lace frame in glass-covered wooden boxes. The cakes have fur or claws sticking out of them, pins and needles perforate the frosting, and a small pair of scissors is stapled on top of one cake. These materials literally break the pretty, perfect surfaces and destroy any illusion of edibility.
Her other pieces at Ruby Green work variations on a common unit of six duck eggs poised on lace backgrounds behind a glass cover, with the lace shrink-wrapped. In most of the pieces, the fronts of the eggshells have been broken out in jagged edges to reveal interiors that contain acetate images. The images pack in dense iconography, drawing from stills of The Wizard of Oz and other classic movies, vintage illustrations and photographs, and what look like overexposed snapshots. She presents the works in series, named after universal emotions and archetypes: Courage, Martyr, Hope, Wish, Prayer, Hero.
The most chilling set of images appears in “Hero II.” The acetates show diagrams of how to construct fingers out of a forearm, where to amputate a leg, and models of shoes with wood inserts, perhaps to accommodate a prosthesis. These images of dismemberment can’t help but bring to mind the casualties from the war in Iraq. By using old pictures and diagrams, Kinsella creates a distancing effect that reminds us of the strategies we use to deny the horrifying realities of our war.
A problem with these pieces is that their impact depends on scrutinizing the small images contained in the duck eggs, and this requires viewers to get up very close and read them like a book. The repetitive arrangement of the pieces doesn’t help to differentiate the content of the images in a particular work.
The most effective of Kinsella’s duck egg series includes a bit less information than the others. “Prayer (Tablecloth)” is a construction of nine groups of duck eggs arrayed in a 3-by-3 square grid on the wall. The top and bottom rows contain intact eggs organized according to subtle gradations of color. The middle row’s eggshells have broken fronts that reveal interiors stuffed with white fur. This work communicates through its overall composition, with transitions of color and contrasts of texture. The focus on a limited range of elements and the gradations of effect impart a meditative quality very consistent with prayer.
Kinsella documents the futility of the instinct to preserve and protect. The steps taken to shelter the objects (putting them in glass cases, encasing them in shrink-wrap) come too late, after they have been broken and distressed. Even so, the instinct to preserve is unquenchable, and the broken eggshells and tainted cakes go into their glass cases like church relics.
Both Kinsella and Johnson find a quiet bravura in their homely materials—the colors and patterns of common bed sheets, the speckling of duck eggs, the frilly patterns of lace and wedding cake. But Kinsella’s transformations of her materials introduce qualities that contrast sharply with the pleasant associations of the delicate objects. Her work also communicates a bit more through surfaces that the viewer can read literally. Johnson’s sculptures present more consistent initial impressions, with pleasing shapes of soft, textured fabric combined within the same families of color. Their depth lies in imagining beyond the abstract designs to remember the ways we use sheets in life. Together, the artists make a good case for the versatility of household imagery as raw material for art.