The three artists in Paper in Motion, now at the Morgan Conservatory, are storytellers as well as visual artists, weaving tales about what it’s like to be human and female in this culture. Their deployment of inventive, unconventional materials and narrative configurations of objects is partly a result of feminist thought soaking deep into the warp of contemporary art-making.
But this isn’t your mother’s feminism any more than it’s your
grandfather’s art. Gender is just part of the mix. L.A.-based
Nancy Baker Cahill takes a .45 caliber pistol and paintings of flowers
on plywood to a shooting range and opens fire. Sometimes she shoots
them in the back, “not only to illustrate the blossom-like exit wound,”
she explains, “but to create tension — even discomfort —
for the viewer (and for me) to now be on the other side of the bullet’s
trajectory.” Some of the paintings are studded with such wounds, but in
others, she paints blossoms around the holes, at once concealing and
mending the damage, remembering that all living things suffer, heal and
ultimately perish, and that every action contains a germ of
violence.
Such thoughts open onto the abyss of time in which an individual
life or all of history disappears. Human presence and motion through
the ages are the ultimate subjects of Oberlin filmmaker Rian
Brown-Orso’s paintings, drawings, collages and other objects. Last
summer she saw the prehistoric paintings found in the depths of caves
in southern France. Part of her interest in them, in works like the
large-scale drawing “Signatures” (showing a frieze of outlines of human
hands interspersed with concentric circles), has to do with unchanging
facts of vision and imagination. Art has always used the drama of light
penetrating darkness and the flickering of images — whether deep
underground by torchlight or in movie theaters — to recreate
movement and captivate audiences.
At the show’s entrance sits an antique sewing machine, primed with
thread and ready to rip. It doubles as controller for a large, skeletal
puppet made of dress forms wadded together. Pumping the cast-iron
treadle triggers the up-and-down needle action of the 19th-century
White machine. But in this case, red thread stretches from the bobbin
around the corner to animate the paper golem. It’s part of an elaborate
trope that includes video components and beautifully composed,
semi-abstract found-object constructions by Nina Sarnelle called
“Selvation.” Sarnelle’s explorations run far and wide, from thoughts
about the pervasive denial of female sexuality in the Bible to
questions about the persistence of ancient symbols through widely
separated historical epochs. At a time when installations are the
currency of often half-baked graduate-school presentations, Sarnelle,
Brown-Orzo and Cahill use the genre to produce thought-provoking and
original works of art.
This article appears in Nov 11-17, 2009.