“Rose Window,” Vadis Turner
“Red Gate” was the knockout work in Vadis Turner’s last solo exhibition at Zeitgeist — 2018’s Bedfellows. The massive grid made of twisted bedsheets that the artist dyed a deep crimson red dominated an entire wall of the gallery, and was immediately recognizable as a breakthrough piece for the artist. Before “Red Gate,” Turner’s best known works had been squarish wall sculptures constructed from shimmering ribbons, and small installations of objects and materials the artist organized on gallery floors. The comparatively massive scale of “Red Gate” made it stand out from Turner’s other work with various fabrics, but the work also conjured novel themes about the liminal spaces occupied by doors, windows and gates.
The gravitas of large-scale work and themes about in-between spaces are front and center in Turner’s current Zeitgeist exhibition, Window Treatments. The show finds Turner expanding on an indoor-outdoor dichotomy by including lots of natural materials in her sculptures, and also includes audio-video collaborations that elevate the already ambitious exhibition into an immersive installation that plays to viewers both inside the gallery and in the surrounding Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood.
Scale is the big — pun intended — detail that I noticed both times I visited the exhibition at Zeitgeist. The show features a dozen works ranging across the entire Zeitgeist display space, which is almost always programmed to include work from two artists at a time. The exhibition flows naturally between massive wall-hanging works that act like bookends on the gallery’s front and back walls — sprawling freestanding sculptures blend with smaller works on pedestals and other large and small pieces mounted on walls. But it’s the biggest pieces, and all their tiny details, that first demand attention.
“Drawn Curtain,” Vadis Turner
“Drawn Curtain” and “Weighted Window” open the show, hanging on the same front gallery wall that held “Red Gate” four years ago. Together, the works measure approximately 12 by 15 feet, and the side-by-side gallery design reads like the artist is literally doubling down on the potential promised by “Red Gate.” Turner has replaced the bedsheets of “Red Gate” with curtains in these works, but she’s also incorporated copper, acrylic, gravel, resin and ribbon. The same materials appear throughout the exhibition, and help vary the colors and surfaces between these similarly structured, grid-shaped pieces, while the copper and gravel speak to the natural spaces that lie beyond our windows. Combinations of these materials cover the sprawling, sinewy surfaces of the works with intricate expressions of color and texture, shape and finish, making each of the sculptures thoroughly gawkable, whether at 20 inches or 20 feet.
From Mondrian to Judd, it’s clear that the art-going public loves a good grid. And Félix González-Torres managed to transform real windows into actual art by adorning them with sheer flowing curtains in his “Untitled (Loverboy)” installation. Turner incorporates Zeitgeist’s generous gallery windows by using audio and visual elements to extend the exhibition to the other side of the glass.
Turner won a Current Arts Fund/Tri-Star Arts grant to help fund this exhibition, which includes lighting and projection mapping by Mike Kluge and Jonny Kingsbury, and motion-activated sound design by Emery Dobyns. One of my favorite pieces in the show is “Rose Window,” which reads like a massive red grid framed in a glowing pink light on the gallery’s back wall. Upon closer inspection, the surface of the grid looks like the titular flowers frozen in ice or encased in glass. It would all be so dramatically delicate if not for the exposed rebar frame and the harsh white LEDs glowing between the front and back halves of the sculpture. The first time I saw the piece, I felt a jolt of weirdness when the audiovisual elements responded as I moved in for a closer look. “Rose Window” recalls the floral subjects of traditional still lifes. It’s also very Blade Runner.
The smallest work in the show is also one of the most outstanding. “Ribbon and Rebar Study” is a delicate drawing that features a piece of loose dangling ribbon sewn through paper that’s decorated with an expressive wash of pink acrylic. The work is framed and hangs on the wall, and its presentation makes it feel even more like a traditional work on paper. The “study” title implies this is a threaded maquette of some kind, but Turner isn’t in the habit of making mock-ups of her work before she creates her large final forms. This “study” is a distillation after the fact. “Ribbon and Rebar Study” recalls the hues of “Rose Window,” but its plunging lines reflect “Conduit” — a large work that hangs on the wall opposite “Study.” “Conduit” features tubular segments of bedsheets, cement and polyfill alternately painted with white acrylic or decorated with copper. The segments curve and droop lyrically in successive vertical waves down the surface of a visible steel grid. The contrast of the grid against the voluptuous, gracefully draping shapes is dramatic, and I hope the smart, refined piece points to the direction Turner is headed next.
