Liz Whitney Quisgard. "Quartet of Squares"
I got around to seeing Integral Elements at the Loveland Museum/Gallery a little on the late end. I want to recommend this show while it’s still up (it runs through April 11) so in the interest of posting this posthaste, I’ll keep the analysis brief and hit the highlights.
This small group show appears loosely organized around the use of decorative surface. That means two things: 1) It’s a very approachable, broadly likable show. 2) Not all of the work had enough smarts to keep me interested, so my own enjoyment of it was pretty selective. Liz Whitney Quiszgard held my interest because she succeeds so well in formal terms. Her needlepoint panels- all geometric abstractions- employ nuanced combinations of vivid colors and subtle patterns. In some cases she uses value changes to create a 3-d effect. Variously, these meditative works bring to mind mandalas, Celtic crosses, traditional quilt patterns. The panels are installed as a single work (Wall Hanging Series)- to great effect. Arrayed over a huge vertical wall space, they seem to vibrate against each other: stunning. I don’t necessarily want to disparage Susan Wechsler: I think for many art lovers, her work will offer an enjoyable visual experience. Her botanical mosaic panels are pretty and well crafted. Personally though, I didn’t find enough to latch onto with her work overall- aesthetically or conceptually. (If you saw the show, and happened to connect more with this artist’s work than I did, I welcome your comments.)
David Chatt and Harriete Estel Berman both appealed to me conceptually- in much, though not all of their work. In the best examples, both marry a deft handling of materials with wry semantic content; Chatt with a sense of playful curiosity, and Berman with a more cutting social agenda. Of Chatt’s glass bead sculptures, the pieces I liked were the ones falling somewhere in-between his competing tendencies towards aesthetic elegance and goofball humor. For example, Portable Pink Parts is intriguing and subtly funny: a little pink and gold beaded box folds out to reveal six compartments. In each is weird treasure, a little beaded body part. I also gravitated towards 108 Meditations in Saffron, in which the artist offers up an unlikely collection of objects for intimate contemplation. Small and ordinary things- like a key, a bell, a pacifier, a pushpin, a coin purse- are rendered to-scale in delicate saffron-colored beadwork, urging the viewer to re-consider what might be the neglected contents of a junk drawer. (Note the sacred association with the color saffron, e.g., as used in the robes of Buddhist monks.)
Berman uses discarded consumer items- tin cans, labels, advertisements- to create sculptures and wall-pieces that draw attention to mass-marketing construction of domesticity and femininity. Some of the work is pretty on-the-nose and reflects more a vintage set of memes, than a contemporary one. The pieces I really liked were the ones where the found materials are altered the most from their originial form. In her strangely vacant house/boxes, using repurposed sections of printed-steel dollhouses, she creates something both uniquely her own and psychologically resonant. Her large floor-piece Grass/’gras is another very successful piece. From a distance it reads as densely textured, varicolored section of turf. Up close, you see that each blade is fashioned from a sliver of printed tin, so the whole is made up of fragmented pieces of consumer messaging. The iconic American lawn is as potent a symbol today as it’s always been; but now we’re aware of the environmental impact of feeding and watering a lush green carpet. Berman’s use of vintage post-consumer material in this piece frames it in terms of our wasteful maintainence of an outmoded status symbol.
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