The essence of travel is glimpsed in a flash along the way to a new place or idea, soaking into the synapses before preconceptions tint and crowd the new impression. For an artist (or an engineer or a designer), it is also a matter of stretching and transforming materials to accompany the questing mind as it tries to grasp dynamic change.
SPACES’ current SWAP (SPACES World Artist Program) resident, Israeli
artist Efrat Klipshtien, is well-equipped to explore both real and
imaginary places, having earned a B.A. in geography and psychology, and
an M.S. in industrial design, followed by fine-art studies. Her
installation and performance art uses everyday objects and materials,
revisiting places, things and ideas as she builds analogous structures
out of papier maché, paper clips or whatever else comes to
hand.
As in much contemporary art, part of the content of her work is the
cumulative way images are assembled. Additive and straightforward,
techniques of this kind gather form rather than depict it and tend to
head off in unexpected directions as they metastasize, paralleling the
unpredictability and danger of the world at large. Over time,
obsessive, tightly controlled actions yield an almost wild randomness,
as in one of Klipshstien’s drawings that begins with the simple
outlines of what looks like a duck decoy, scattered widely over a large
piece of paper. Each outline is echoed again and again; minor
deviations from the original occur, which are then repeated and
exaggerated in layer upon layer of visual vibrations, spreading to join
in an all-over abstract composition. The finished work looks like a
detailed topographical map. A tendency to grasp the reins of content
loosely is relaxed further by her use of loyal family members and
friends to help with more labor-intensive accumulations. For a 2004
work titled “Handle With Care,” 23 people labored over a period of two
months. They hooked thousands of paper clips together in interlinking
octagons and slung the finished 4.5-by-10 meter expanse from the Janko
Dada Museum’s ceiling in a series of peaks, like an airy metal sketch
of mountains or circus tents.
Klipshtien and other contemporary installation artists — like
New York’s Diana Cooper whose complex exhibit at MOCA Cleveland in 2007
featured room-size mindscapes made of foam core and office scraps (and
who also employed a small army of helpers) — suggest that the
creative act is a generative field induced in materials by repetition,
images and ideas rubbing together. Within those broad parameters,
anything goes.
At SPACES, Klipshtien’s “Red Winged Black Bird” is a landscape
fantasy recreating a few basic natural forms using plaster, latex paint
and aluminum foil. Six hollow, black-painted plaster cones, chunky and
looking like loosely knitted caps, rise here and there from a
charcoal-gray floor. Washing toward these stylized mountains, hundreds
of interlocking, braided lengths of aluminum foil cascade down from the
ceiling across the gallery. Like a waterfall or an enchanted net,
the sweep of crinkled silver is the froth of wonder right at its edge,
as it scatters and soaks into more ordinary things.
Around the corner, where SPACES’ rear windows are hidden by sections
of drywall, rise three pale, knobby plaster columns four or five inches
thick. They resemble bamboo maybe, or a cactus-like plant from another
planet. Several small sprigs of smooth red-orange glass sprout near the
top, while others seem to wriggle tadpole-like on the floor; perhaps
they aren’t plants after all. The light is dim, as if from an alien
sun. We aren’t in Kansas anymore or, for that matter, Ohio or Israel.
We’re nowhere, intruding in the fictional space of a work of art,
sidling around tentacles of aluminum foil with black cones for company.
On two adjacent walls, four only slightly more conventional works
outline delicate fern-cactus forms spreading in elegant tangles,
scratched through a green metallic surface with a mat knife to an
underlayer of white paper. These large “drawings” resemble
mid-19th-century photographic experiments and add a graceful note to
the installation, like botanical illustrations included in an
exobiological diorama. Klipshtien says the name of the strange place
she has made is like four words in a short poem — “red winged
black bird.” The familiar North American species isn’t present
here, only the primal contrast of red and black, the thought of flight
and the ghost of a bird, as small, shining colors bloom in a desert of
effort and time.
Klipshtien’s installation is the high point of her nine-week
residency and —though exhibited as a separate work —
reflects thematic concerns explored in other ways by the eight artists
in SPACES’ current show Internal Compasses, which also opened
last Friday. For instance, Virginia-based duo Derek Coté and
Nicole Baumann, in their installation “Starchitecture and the Bean
Stalk,” build and photograph models of well-known art-world
architectural spaces like the Whitney Museum and the Rothko Chapel,
posing questions about the realities of artificial things as they
comment on contemporary interactions of art, design and use.
This article appears in May 20-26, 2009.