Until feminist art of the 1970s broke down barriers between “high art” and “crafts,” painting and media like fiber arts didn’t generally end up hanging on the same walls. Today, that separation seems anachronistic, and gallery artists use every variety of craft technique imaginable. Still, painting and fiber arts offer really different sensory experiences. Painting is all about vision, while fiber art is inherently tactile—even if you don’t touch it, your mind registers an impression of what it feels like before considering its meaning. Pairing artists from these arenas can make for a disjointed viewing experience as you shift from the symbol-heavy environment of painting into the craft realm, where direct sensory impressions count for more of the experience. For its last show before moving into a new space, TAG has paired painter Erin Anfinson and feltmaker Lisa Klakulak, but these artists are equally sophisticated in their handling of visual information. Rather than disjunction, you get two engaging perspectives on the question of what anyone can or does see. Anfinson, on the faculty at MTSU, has two distinct bodies of work in this show. In the first group, she manipulates images of landscapes and violent encounters in the animal world, reducing the resolution to make them less distinct and limiting the colors to tones of a single hue. The result looks at first like camouflage fabric, but forms emerge as your eyes adjust to the palette. In “Moving Flock,” you can make out a group of turkeys in the foreground of a woodland scene with a bunch of blackbirds rising behind them. But the forms are indistinct enough that the foreground shapes can also look like hippos—a point of deliberate ambiguity where no interpretation sits still very well. The second set of work also morphs under longer viewing. The elements are easier to make out—fragments of images painted in black on washes of color and overlaid with circles of thick, single tones. Though easier to identify, the fragments are hard to interpret because of their absurd combinations—like the dog head on a bird’s body in “Lookout”—and because Anfinson has plunked those circles on the images. Local painter Carol Mode has used black circles and ovals to suggest the vision impairment of “floaters,” which obstruct parts of the field of vision, and Anfinson’s circles have a similar effect of blocking the view. When you start with collage effects and then mask part of the image, it becomes difficult to “read” the shapes still visible, which puts viewers into an awkward suspension between comprehension and incomprehension, between what can be seen and what cannot. In its very structure, felt depends on what cannot be seen. As Klakulak explains, felt is made by getting animal hair soapy and wet, and then agitating the fibers. Because of the microscopic scales covering them, the hairs swell and twist and interlock, “forming tighter knots until the piece shrinks and there’s no air in between the fibers.” (If you don’t believe her, put a wool sweater in a washing machine and see what happens.) In the workshops she teaches, Klakulak finds that people experience this transformation as a kind of magic—“because you can’t tell what’s going on microscopically.” She moves from this basic mystery to psychological and social observations that resonate with Anfinson’s concerns about visual perception. Some of Klakulak’s work involves functional objects, like purses and head coverings, but her designs call attention to and comment on the roles these items have in covering, enclosing and protecting. Her purses, for example, often include little windows, like “Dormant,” which you can see straight through, thanks to two metal screen panels. The opening calls attention to the role of purses—hiding things from view—and simultaneously undercuts it. In the same way, the head covering called “Worn” consists of a web of white felt and shells punctured with gaps in the felt and holes in the shells—not the most effective protection. These pieces capture the impulse to seek shelter, but they also cast doubt on whether a person can achieve any real security. Several of Klakulak’s purely sculptural pieces look inside the human body and find surprising contents in little reliquary chambers. “Entrapment” is the headless bust of a woman with crinkled skin made from a patchwork of silk felted onto wool. The woman’s chest opens up in a wire mesh cage that holds a little felt heart with veins detailed in the tones of blue and red used in anatomy textbooks. In front of her lies a pile of rusted keys, providing an unexpected contrast of material and texture while invoking obsolescence and the failure to get through protective structures. The sculpture reveals non-visible interior features portrayed in a literally anatomical manner that hides some of the symbolic content behind a scientific surface. This exhibit provides a great example of how putting two artists into proximity can allow you to see certain aspects of each artist especially clearly. In the TAG show, the irony of the pairing is that what emerges most strongly is a shared interest in what hides or escapes from sight.
