Our experience of art is based on what the work shows us
combined with the personal experience we bring to it. So when I entered the
back room of the Kate Werble Gallery group show Duplify yesterday and saw a couple turtle shells split down their
center with a piece of stainless steel, the formal presentation and comment on
symmetry (and an “old” organic form/nature ready-made vs. the “new” shiny prefabricated
material) was dominated by my remembrance of a recent article someone had sent
me. It was about super-realistic 3D-printed decoy tortoise shells that are
being sprayed with an off-putting substance, and scattered around the
southwestern deserts in order to condition ravens (the main desert tortoise
predator) to not eat them into extinction.
I also thought about the oversized tortoise shell I saw on a recent visit to Thomas Edison’s laboratories in New Jersey, which he had (along with elephant hides and animal hooves) to sample these materials for his (then state-of-the-art) experiments and products. Both of these thoughts altered the intended contrast set up by the artist (Andy Meerow) but enriched my own experience, which would have been less interesting without them.
I also thought about the oversized tortoise shell I saw on a recent visit to Thomas Edison’s laboratories in New Jersey, which he had (along with elephant hides and animal hooves) to sample these materials for his (then state-of-the-art) experiments and products. Both of these thoughts altered the intended contrast set up by the artist (Andy Meerow) but enriched my own experience, which would have been less interesting without them.
This is also true of the work at the gallery by Émilie
Pitoiset: two leather gloves – one posed holding the cigarette and the other
fingering a coin. Seeing these, it is hardly possible for me to not recall Wisława
Szymborska’s Muzeum poem,
particularly the line The hand has lost
out to the glove. Unintended by Pitoiset and Werble, the placement of these
objects in a temporary show in a hip, modern gallery, with Szymborska’s words
in mind is a brilliant stab at her nemesis – time and the victory of object
over the owner – and joins her in the concluding lines:
As for me, I am still alive, you see.
The battle with my dress still rages on.
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I’m gone!
The battle with my dress still rages on.
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I’m gone!
Across from the gloves is a dress, of sorts: a
multi-material conglomeration portrait on canvas titled Perched. It is a
colorful and lively piece that satisfies painting and sculptural urges. Its
hands, and other features, are a wonderful struggle of representation – a neurotic
triumph over possible failure, and hyper-representation over realism. These
hands do not fool use as hands but are an amazing representation of hands:
restless, veiny, clawing.