Latest show from Off the Wall artist collective highlights the narrative quality of art
by Russell JohnstonArticle Tools
The artist collective Off the Wall describes its 11th show, Talcum Fables, as a foray into storytelling. While these stories, on display at Scarritt-Bennett Center's gallery F through March 6, run the gamut from playful to painful, the six women artists share an experimental approach to their materials and a knack for uniting the personal and the conceptual.
Mahlea Jones' "Nature's Code" is a compelling sequence on small sheets of fibrous handmade paper, with words and images lightly stamped onto the richly textured background. The line illustrations, lifted from old-timey biology books, show the developmental cycles of a flower and of a fertilized human egg. The images all sport dedications, collected from the front matter of various books. These tributes, personal yet anonymous, suggest various unattributed books. The tributes still feel personal, and suggest a meditation on the cycle of literary and artistic inspiration along with biological germination.
And that meditation includes an inevitable fading away. The mostly unknown names are only temporarily rescued from obscurity, the images sometimes faint to the point of invisibility. The paper is stained yellow with pollen, but the volatile dye itself is fading quickly in the light — Jones calls these her "disappearing drawings" for a reason.
Jenny Luckett reflects on the synchronization of her body's cycles with moon cycles in three beautiful pieces, including "The Call of The Moon," which adapts the old picture-book convention of faces in the moon. The images start with a full moon that seems to trap the face inside it, then move through gradual contraction into a crescent where facial profile and moon merge in a single identity. The watercolors are on old, yellow-edged paper, contributing to their timeless air.
A piano dominates much of gallery F's front room. Nicole Baumann decided to treat the instrument as ally rather than obstacle, yielding one of the show's most whimsical and charming pieces, "A Busy Bee Sat on a Bushel of Blossoms." Baumann adorned the instrument with an array of colorful stickers mainly in the shapes of flowers, but also of strawberries, rabbits, acorns, airplanes ... even an occasional skull-and-crossbones. It was reminiscent of how a cheerful 11-year-old girl might decorate her notebook, albeit with much greater attention to aesthetic detail.
Apparently, the titular "Busy Bee" got in someone's bonnet, and the gallery's Scarritt-Bennett Center overlords, fearing damage to the piano's wood finish, demanded that Baumann remove the stickers and reframe her concept at a more decorous distance from the Steinway. This came despite the fact that Baumann had applied them with a special adhesive so as not to damage the instrument. To calm the Piano Preservation Patrol, the artist moved her stickers onto the floor to form a reverse silhouette around the instrument — maybe suggesting a crime scene's body outline? A deft parry, but unfortunately one that lost the wonderful contrast of exuberant color against a formal black ground.
The ambiguously biomorphic imagery of Iwonka Waskowski's "Missing Chromosome Series (Part I)" provides one of the shows most striking works. At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than coffee stains on paper, but Waskowski isn't making some anti-aesthetic statement — the rich and stratified colors in her personal Rorschach test have clearly taken a good deal of experimentation to achieve. And the randomness has a narrative context here — the work records Waskowski's struggle to accept the seemingly random physical symptoms of her sister's Turner syndrome.
Jaime Raybin's "Paleontological Terrarium" draws literally from what the group calls "the inherent reference point for each of the artists" — the female body. The centerpiece of her installation includes massive enlargements from microscopic photographs of blood and earwax as well as some beautifully luminous pictures of pollen, which create a nice resonance with Jones' pollen-painted work in the next room.
Raybin enlisted an engineering consultant to help with the microscopy, but her science fair exhibit is strictly tongue-in-cheek. Her hilarious pamphlet on "The Scientific Method" offers us lay folk such sage advice as "write on graph paper to give yourself extra credibility."
Another playful entry came from Marcie Little, who unfolded an old hardback copy of Robert Penn Warren's Flood into an elegant visual pun. She's propped the book open and refashioned its pages to form to form both surging waves inside the book and a flotilla of paper boats escaping in an ascending spiral.
Little's photography strikes a more subdued note. A wonderful series taken during a year in Europe suggests an inner as well as outer journey. The image of a mass-produced plastic chair under a rusty, obsolete fuse box in the piece "place of rest" captures her characteristic blend of immediacy and nostalgia, but the atmosphere of these pictures stems as much from their home-developed look as from the subject matter.
Off The Wall's like-minded core members have been exhibiting together since 2005, and they invited Little and Baumann to participate in Talcum Fables. The works discussed above are only a few highlights of the varied show, which runs at gallery F through March 6.
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