Category: Uncategorized

by Thalia Vrachopoulos, Ph.D.

Choi’s multifaceted installations employ the abstracted human form in movement as sign language thus demonstrating a relationship to collective memory and Jungian archetypes, and in their essentialized forms, to cave painting also. Human Evolution I, 2019 which a triptych of neutral background with navy and puce colored signs and a central tondo with rune-like shapes, reveals the artist’s interest in pre-historic cultures. His works in general and this work in particular, can be read in terms of the four main Jungian archetypes the anima/animus representing our true self, the shadow or our negative side, the persona which is our public side, and the self that is a unified whole symbolized by a circle such as the ones in Choi’s works. As Jung believed, these archetypes represent globally accepted innate forms that are part of patterns of human behavior. In addition, the psychologist found that the idea behind these ‘primordial images’ or mythical/archaic archetypes were part and parcel of any human.

These types of archetypical forms are used by many well-known contemporary artists including the Israeli Michal Rovner. But, whereas Rovner works with new media as in her Tablets, 2004, Choi for the most part, works with mixed media and painting. Rovner references specific traumatic events like the Palestinian crisis, Choi looks to engage with the history of humanity in general. These cyphers act as foil for Choi to examine and deploy cultural sign as language that involves looking into the human past to find the present. Both Rovner and Choi use what appear to be letters but which are abstracted human forms in dance-like movement that leave their trace on the page as does writing or inscribing on a page. Whereas Rovner re-interprets history through new media, Choi re-discovers and pays tribute to it.

Choi’s drawings can be seen as marks of communication and at the same time as cave painting and human evolution or traces of human presence. In his wall installation Human Evolution II, 2019 Choi uses a puce color background upon which are inscribed simplified human figures in shades of brown, rust and white. Because both the white and the colored figures depict human forms through linear networks much like cave paintings or Greek geometric vase paintings, there is a resultant figure ground ambiguity that takes place where we read the white as background and as figure and vice versa. This type of inscription is similar to sgraffito used on Greek pottery but also has a relationship to ancient Chinese oracle bones. These sgraffitoed bones were usually animal scapulae that were inscribed by the King in order to divine the seasonal cycle’s production a practice that began in the Shang Dynasty. Oracle bones were also known as dragon bones. This practice after the Chou Dynasty was abandoned by the King but was continued by Shamans who were more often than not women. The King or Shaman would carve the questions onto the bone, apply heat with a metal rod and then read the patterns of the cracking produced by the heat. Because these markings in the early 20^th century, proved to be historical characterized by writing, we can say that Choi’s engagement with them segues from the pre-historic into the historical eras. Consequently, Choi traces human existence through its traces or signs.

Like the Egyptian Palette of Narmer (c.3100 BC) or the Akkadian tablet of Naram-sin (c. 2254-2218 BC) Choi’s tablets are executed in relief sculpture but the latter is not about famous battle victories like the earlier. Choi’s figures are not engaged in battle or proudly depicting a larger than life leader, they are evenly spaced and sized. The ancient tablets were sized hieratically whereas the King is the largest figure and everyone else was sized according to their importance in that society. Choi’s evenly sized figures are concordant with the idea of democracy wherein individual figures are evenly configured. Marxist critic Linda Nochlin discusses George Seurat’s divisionism in terms of political allegories of parity and the ‘anti-Utopian’ modern condition. 

The floor installation piece Human Evolution III, 2019 because of its orientation holds similarities to Carl Andre”s minimalist sculptures. Both Choi and Andre used grid formatted structures to give order to their language. They also used repetition as a way of emphasizing their linear forms and placed their sculptures on the floor. But whereas Andre emphasized the space above his works that could even be read as column, Choi focuses on the solidity attained from carving elements in relief that depict the exchange relationship between solid and void. This idea relates to the Korean concept of yin yang found in Taoism one of the religious philosophies combined with Buddhism and Confucianism prevalent in Korea of today. To Taoism and consequently to Choi who is Korean, they represent the yin and yang sign that is both solid and void simultaneously.

Human Evolution III, 2019 appears like a checkered black and white pattern comprised of tiles inscribed by similar figures as in his wall works. In keeping with the legend of the grain of wheat and Zarathustra’s game with the King, chess is a game of power. Thus, this work can also be compared to chess and brings us full circle to the start of this essay regarding cosmic archetypes as the required element necessary to battle our own egos.

by Antje K. Gamble

Curated by T. Michael Martin, the large retrospective at the Clara M. Eagle Gallery allowed for a deep look at the shifts throughout D. Dominick Lombardi’s almost five decade long career. From the more Surrealist inspired paintings to assemblage sculptures, High + Low engages with Lombardi’s playful experimentation of art and found materials and highbrow and lowbrow visual references.

The installation of High + Low at the Murray State University Eagle Gallery created cross-decade perspectives on developing themes in Lombardi’s work. (For full disclosure, I am on the faculty of Murray State University.) For example, in the opening space, Martin placed Lombardi’s earliest works from the 1970s with those just completed in 2019. This juxtaposition highlighted developments over time and, importantly, connections between Lombardi’s earliest and latest works.

Among his earlier works like Cyborg Sunbathers (1975), the use of the cyborg, like the Surrealist use of the automaton, engages a sense of the uncanny. The large central female figure casts a ominous shadow on the headless foreshadowed male laying at the bottom of the canvas. The main pair are of comparable size, while the others in the composition are much smaller in comparison. At the same time, the large ominous female figure’s import is in the visual effects of her present, which contrast with the logic of the rest of the painting. As a femme fatale type, her shadow looms large and in contrast to the logic of the rest of the painting. At the same time, the series of circles throughout the canvas from the figures’ joints, to the clouds, to the sandy footprints, carry though as a repeated pattern throughout a number of the later works in Lombardi’s oeuvre.

There are a number of larger currents to connect Lombardi’s career, which were already present in the early Cyborg series, where humanity has survived through the evolution and mechanization. Things like conspicuous consumption, pollution, and climate change show up in various ways throughout the exhibition in both his two and three dimensional works. For example, in the Need is Chance Rising (2015), Lombardi integrates found objects into an inventive tabletop sculpture. This simultaneously evokes humor and whimsy, but also unease. The detritus of a capitalist consumer society recycled out of necessity to create a monstrous, hybrid new figure. Like the cyborgs of his earlier series, his sculptural figures are ad hoc survivors.

Early on, his paintings begin to incorporate remnants of older canvases, newspapers, stickers, and even plexiglas to create a rich layering of images and meaning. Some of the most exciting aspects of these works are reminiscent Pop and Assemblage, from artists like Eduardo Paolozzi and Robert Rauschenberg. Starting in the 1990s, Lombardi’s Reverse Collage series creates visually dynamic layers of form and language. His use of newspaper clippings, create ghosts of the physical object whose materiality have been rubbed away. This creates an oscillation between recognition (like Jackie Kennedy in Reverse Collage #26, 1995) and obfuscation. Similarly, the Cross Contamination series channels the popular counter cultural use of stickers to cover the public visual landscape. The underlying paintings and digital prints serve, in various ways, to signal the past cultural norms being covered, updated, and altered by the younger generation and/or the new popular culture. The designed stickers have formal comparisons to his other works that come before; and serve, like the material manipulations in Reverse Collage series, to both reveal and hide layers of meaning.

The centrality of the idea of the “collective unconscious” in Lombardi’s conception of the work is used to explain all these aspects; and the exhibition includes a series of works titled Collective Unconscious. The Jungian concept focuses on the idea that archetypical imagery connecting humanity. Lombardi’s divergence from the Surrealist canon, which favored Freud’s more individualistic ideas, however, is still connected to an early twentieth-century Euro-American psychological discipline. In the end, Lombardi’s “collective consciousness” is decidedly from a particular American perspective. This, sometimes uncritical, American perspective is most clearly apparent in the Tattooed series. In the 2000s Tattooed series, Lombard uses overlaid designs reminiscent of popular tattoo designs on new or recycled canvases. According to the artist, the Tattooed series imagines a future breakdown of society when only children survive. In this future, the most important aesthetics are American tribal tattoos, which were designs originally culturally appropriated from Polynesian indigenous rites and popularized in the U.S. in the 1990s and 2000s. Here the tattooed overlays are painted as signals to the childish, debased, popular visual culture, but without a critical engagement with the nature of the source images as colonialist. As in the later the Tattooed Tokyo sub-series makes even more apparent, these serve as another form of colonial imperialism. Inspired by his trips to Japan and South Korea, this series reads as a kind of contemporary Japonisme.

by D. Dominick Lombardi

The Frist Art Museum in Nashville does two things remarkably well. Like other capitol city museums throughout the United States, they present fully resolved, educational exhibitions filled with extraordinary works of art supported by thoughtful text and labeling. Most recently, the exhibition, Monsters & Myths:Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940, which features works borrowed largely from two prestigious institutions; The Baltimore Museum of Art and The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, offered a great number of iconic works such as the mesmerizing Europe After the Rain II (1940-42) by Max Ernst. In addition to this, the Frist offers a very special form of community outreach in their programming that speaks directly to the citizens of Nashville, giving a much needed public forum to those with perpetual urgent concerns. One of their current exhibitions, Murals of North Nashville, which closes January 5, 2020, is a strikingly energetic and social-political collection of murals created by local artists. Each participant has, in some very personal way, a deep connection to North Nashville’s African American neighborhoods – areas that are in the midst of great change due to encroaching gentrification. Curated by The Frist’s own Katie Delmez, this exhibition sheds much needed light on “both the persistent problems such as displacement, gun violence, and incarceration, as well as positive elements like thriving black-owned businesses, a revitalized art scene, and valued educational institutions”. 

All nine of the 8 x 12 foot works for the Murals of North Nashville exhibition are installed in the Conte Community Arts Gallery. This is a very important feature of the Frist, since this space in the museum is accessible to all visitors, as it has no entry fee. All of the installed works have very powerful messaging ranging from violence and despair to hopeful progress. Omari Booker’s The Writing’s on the Walls, features a woman in a rocking chair on the front porch of what looks to be a home built during the Arts and Crafts era. The house, which has its outline overtly defined with red razor wire, refers to “redlining,” a process used by certain institutions, primarily in the financial and real estate fields, in order to separate out minority neighborhoods for the sole purpose of perpetuating their economic woes. The subsequent encroaching gentrification takes up the entire background of this work, as it is covered with newly placed construction materials, while the somewhat less obvious pink-vest-wearing upscale pooch enters the picture plane from the bottom right corner, a detail that is contrasted by the fiery shaped, dying bushes in front of the porch on the left side of the house. This more than metaphorical battle between the underrepresented and oppressed, and the more privileged ‘protagonists’ in this never-ending drama speaks volumes of the inequities based on wealth, which brings political and private access, and race. 

Brandon Donahue’s Rest in Peace lists all the names, in various styles of eye-catching graffiti, of all the individuals struck down by guns in North Nashville. What first appears as a joyful and celebratory list of local names ends up leaving viewers with a strong feeling of loss and thoughts of what could have been. Conversely, hope and change comes in the form of energetic children and strong women. Elisheba Israel Mrozik’s Unmask ‘Emshows the power of women who will lead the way, being best equipped to overcome the many sides of suffering built upon the unfortunate truth that justice is not blind. The central figure in the composition, which is a cross between the Madonna and Childand the Pietá, has an otherworldly feel, while the corruption that surrounds is about to be uncovered by righteous disciples. In the end, there is a path to the Promised Land, once the spoilers of future fairness are eradicated. 

Forever, created by the Norf Art Collective, also holds quite a bit of promise, as it features children who will continue the work of all those who have come before, aided by greater opportunity and better education leading to the promise in true equality. The dominating figure, a girl in a yellow dress, runs through the composition as she leaves her tag in ecru paint across a world of blue chiaroscuro painting that clearly defines her path to happiness and success. LeXander Bryant’s Opportunity Co$t is a six-stationed stream of powerful graphics and unifying text in red, black and yellow – all making one think of revolution at first. Only this time, the revolution is about progressive, positive change for people of color; community outreach for all, and the kept promise of a sustainable and sustaining jobs. Additional works by XPayne, Nuveen Barwari, Marlos E’-van and Courtney Adair Johnson round off this field of powerful and compelling murals at the Frist, while other public sites can be found with the exhibition’s accompanying map, which locates numerous outdoor wall paintings throughout North Nashville.

by Gae Savannah

Puns abound in Carl Fudge’s work. An initial loom is formed of Japanese anime and Ukiyo-e prints. Child luminaries radiate mystical powers, while behind screens, kimonos beckon. To transmit the electricity felt in these genres, the artist wrote a program to simulate children’s paper cutouts. Thereby, applying the algorithm, hereconstitutes the Japanese visual systems into new offbeat schema.  In Komposition B, snowflake-y shapes appear in punchy pinks and oranges. Then puzzle-piece lacunas recall Japanese usage of negative space,ma. Fudge’s use of this emptiness amidst the vibratory hues, makes the piece seem bigger than it is. The patterns are given to us close up, evoking a here-ness.  

Contextualizing Fudge’s novel, graphic language can prove daunting. There’s the original appeal of the Japanese flatness, which ballasted Modernism. Then there are some parallels with the hard edge abstraction of someone like Jack Youngerman, (who also made prints referencing the Floating World). Also felt are the crisp digital lines of Manfred Mohr.  Otherwise, one’s mind goes not to canonical contemporary art, but to maverick practitioners such as Lisa Alvarado, with banners inspired by Mexican weaving. Additionally, loosely invoked are ethnic textiles such as Ikat, religious architectural iconography, and even water patterns. Mirror-image concatenations of organic rhombuses brocade the upper corner of Tattooed Blue. Meanwhile, a shungafigure shape-shifts into a pale blue inlet, spilling across the composition. Then, in They’re Everywhere, curved and straight-edged minarets form an open weave. Echoing rhythmically across and down the square, they mesh into an unorthodox geometry.  Mapless, one feels intoxicated by an exotic city.  

Finally, Mobile Suite 5 is cut from a different cloth. Here, Fudge toys with another mesmeric lure, Transformers  (also originating in Japan). More hinged to concept though, this piece lacks rich interplay among the spatial layers. Yet, on purple ground, the green spires and other inscrutable patterning still draw us in. All in all, not absent behind Fudge’s arch wit, is an underlying mirth, a relishing of visual pleasure – as if art can be indeed, a game of seduction.

by Siba Kumar Das

New York City is constantly pushing the world of art to reboot itself. To see how a young Korean-American artist is contributing to this ceaseless reinvention in a promising way, go to 69 Eldridge Street in Lower Manhattan and there, in a popup display space exemplifying cultural entrepreneurship, you will encounter sixteen paintings that will give you a memorable viewing experience. 

Nurtured by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then by Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, Jung Ho Lee is an artist drawn to multiple genres – sculpture, painting, collage, and photography. While sculpture initially dominated his professional life, he is now exploring a freedom that painting has opened up for him. From a practice where he found himself driven towards a fixed destination he has transitioned to a style where he is more impelled by process and the signals thrown up by his materials. This liberation has given us the paintings on show, from June 12-23, 2019, at the Eldridge Street exhibit, curated by Robert Curcio. 

Jung Ho Lee has thought deeply about the course of Korean art and its crossover implications for American art. He is also trying hard to understand better the world he lives in. Doing so in a quotidian way, he applies to this challenge a sensibility enlivened by an omnivorous visual imagination. Going about his day-to-day life, he imports into his image bank scenes of decay, decline, and disorder. Allan Kaprow, a significant influence on Jung Ho Lee, saw in the everyday world “the most astonishing inspiration conceivable.” He said, “A walk down 14^th Street is more amazing than any masterpiece of art.” Look now to the paintings Jung Ho Lee has spotlighted for us not far from 14^th Street. Metamorphosed in them is entropy’s materiality sublimated into growth and renewal. 

In Self-Portrait (2018) you discern many influences transformed into a veiled, allusive picture of this first-generation Korean-American artist possibly looking for an aesthetic or philosophical breakthrough. You see street art, Art Brut, Art Informel, and the art of Jean Dubuffet. You see color throwing off symbolic associations, just as it did for Vincent van Gogh when he gazed at Delacroix’s paintings. There are ideas derived from the Abstract Expressionists, especially Hans Hoffman and Willem de Kooning. 

A very recent innovation of Jung Ho Lee’s is his use of plastic netting as a support in place of canvas and the application of a painted grid as a final layer. An example is Untitled D (2019), where you see a gray-black landscape lurking behind a blue-gray grid – the latter so shaped it seems to be an object extracted from the natural world, not a geometrical abstraction. You again think of Jean Dubuffet, especially his extraordinary landscapes. You see vestigial references to Asian landscape painting, a genre so universal and durable in its impact it is being reinvented in contemporary times. A similar remembrance was at work in the art of Nam Kwan, one of the first generation of twentieth-century Korean modernists. You see his influence in Untitled D. 

Jung Ho Lee’s art represents an emerging episode in the encounter between Western and Eastern art. As for subject matter, his paintings express metaphorically the possibility of growth and renewal even as entropy remains insistent. At a time of political disorder and environmental decay, the Eldridge Street exhibit may be telling us that art can be an ecological force. 

by Emese Krunák-Hajagos

Solitude surrounds the guest when entering Emmanuel Monzon’s exhibition at Robert Kananaj Gallery in Toronto. All the photographs seem similar at first glance in their quiet compositions and monochrome colours. Taking a closer look, one recognizes their nuances – and becomes mesmerised by their magical beauty. They radiate an ephemeral, almost surreal tension that captivates the viewer.

Monzon, a French born artist graduated from the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and started his career with painting, and his painterly values still dominate his photographs. They look like watercolours and are printed on watercolour paper. Moving to Seattle was a turning point in his life. As he said, “I had the feeling that my work could only be photographic for this space, which creates its own mythology.” Indeed, it did, as Monzon’s photographs are very unique in their themes, depictions and colouring.

Monzon travels a lot in the American West, around the deserts where urban settlements, surrounded by suburbs, meet industrial areas and a no-man’s lands of rocks and sand. All his images are entirely devoid of humans. Some suggest human occupation such as Urban Sprawl 167, with a parked trailer, parking spots, a strong outline of a building. The grey surface of asphalt ends abruptly at a rock and the landscape takes over. The pervasive colour is burnt sand – the whole area is covered with it, even the building seems to be made from bricks carved from the rock. There are traces of people, the neon sign at Jazzercise is on, there is a light inside the shop and in the building in the background, cars are in the parking lot – but not a single person or animal is around (Urban Sprawl 165). The only living thing is the large cactus, standing in front of a traffic light. The light has turned green – but for whom. Who had to stop and why at the stop sign (Urban Sprawl 164) and walk over the pedestrian crossing? As far as the eye can see there is nothing in that flat landscape that surrounds a sand rock – except emptiness. One can almost hear the moan of the soil cracked by heat, beaten and barren, or the silent cry of a lonely tree fenced out of the garden behind it (Urban Sprawl 165).

Where are these places? Where are the people and animals? Even the shadows are not there. What’s happening? Did the people leave or is this a post-apocalyptic world? Maybe none of these. Rather I think it is a landscape with its “own mythology.” Monzon captures moments that can best be described as “in-between” moments, in which the activities of the town stopped for the day and haven’t started for a new one, where everyone sleeps or hides, where the place is left by itself. 

Monzon’s landscapes are heavily modified, desecrated even destroyed by our hunger for expansion, making the land banal and ugly. Still we can’t deny the beauty in these photographs, but such a cruel beauty it is. As Monzon stated in his latest interview, “the American natural landscape has redefined this space and has become itself a ‘non-place’. The transition from one site to the next: You have arrived and at the same time you have never left.” Whatever this place is, it is not the place you want to be. French anthropologist Marc Augè defined “non-place” as a place of anonymous solitude, like airports, motorways, parking lots where people meet in an illusion that they can be socially engaged, but actually it is not possible. Monzon photographs depict these “non-places” in their true nature: as timeless places where there are no sounds, only emptiness.

However beautifully depicted, this emptiness is sad, even painful. Urban Sprawl 162 portrays a dinosaur figure that would be more appropriately found in Disneyland. In its poor surroundings he almost smiles rather than snarls, his maker must be an amateur. He is definitely in limbo here, no one looks at him, he is totally isolated and his being is meaningless. 

Urban Sprawl 182 reminds me of an ancient outdoor shrine in an old landscape, something like Stonehenge. Surrounded by ageless landscape there is an altar. That altar is made of concrete and an asphalt road leads to it. What kind of cruel joke is this? However, there is still a spiritual power surge about it. What God is worshipped here? Will he or she lift or destroy the soul? There is something sacramental in this uneasy emptiness and the unconscious mind resonates with the spirits occupying the shimmering whiteness of this place. Monzon captures the moment of eternity and the eternity in the moment at the same time. His photographs show a void, a void that can not be filled.

Images are all 30 x 30 inches, digital print on Canson Arches Infinity watercolor paper (acid free), framed, Limited edition (1/3 ed of 3 +1AP), 2018, courtesy of Robert Kananaj Gallery and the artist.

*Exhibition information: Emmanuel Monzon, Urban Sprawl Emptiness, March 16 -May 18, 2019, Robert Kananaj Gallery, 172 St Helens Avenue, Toronto.

by Emese Krunák-Hajagos

Humans have always wanted to save their memories. From the beginning of history, they carved them into stones, wrote them on parchments, made millions of photographs or selfies. Iris Häussler buried the items that hold her memories in wax – literally. You might think: a nice try, but it won’t hold, it’ll melt – but you’re wrong. A wax object, like a candle, doesn’t melt that easily, not even on a window sill or on a mantle above a fireplace. Unless you put a torch directly in front of it Häussler’s work would hardly melt or drip, not even the smaller pieces and especially not the larger ones ‑ they’re so heavy that more than one person is needed to move these blocks of solid wax. 

Wax has been used in encaustic painting for a long time but Häussler uses wax in a very unique way. She melts the wax, pours it into containers of various shapes and sizes then put clothes in it like you would put them in warm water to wash them. Her original idea, as she mentioned in an interview, came from looking at laundry, at very ordinary objects such as bed sheets, curtains and clothes we wear. However, these objects, that we usually ignore, have much more to them than we can see at first sight. Bedclothes for example, save your shape and warmth for about half an hour after you abandon them. Undergarments are very intimate as they touch the skin on the surface, but on a deeper level they absorb the perspiration and the scent of the body, getting under the skin as well. Clothes are also personal, their style and colour tell a whole story about the person, their age and social status. Häussler mentioned, that she focuses more on the relationship to the people whose clothes she uses, and not on memories, but of course the two easily overlap each other. Her works are open to multiple interpretations as they are heavily loaded with narratives.

Iris Häussler, a German born artist who presently lives in Toronto, has had numerous exhibitions worldwide. This is her second show at Daniel Faria Gallery. Upon entering the gallery, we are welcomed by Häussler’s larger pieces. Natural wax has a special colour, the color of candles. Indeed, these works radiate solitude, the silence of candles placed in churches. As the show’s title Lost Gazes suggests, you need to look deeply at them to actually see what lays beneath the surface. Verlorene Blicke (Lost Gazes, 2000) uses a curtain, its texture recognizable if you study them long enough and have a clue what to look for. They reminded me at first of antique friezes that the artist might have studied at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin as they have the same delicate surface pattern of weathered stone. The curved parts of these “friezes” cast an almost white shadow, hardly visible, making them sculptural. Even though they are large, they look very vulnerable in their beauty and that’s the moment when we recognize that they are actually made of wax.

Most of Häussler’s works are titled after a relative such as mother, sister, great aunt. Two works are titled Schwester (Sister) however they are very different in their colouring and possible narratives. The one in the main space of the gallery is lighter in color and more abstract. Even though we know that clothes are the essence of the image, it looks like a child’s broken kaleidoscope, where all the colorful shapes have escaped and become frozen in wax. The back space of the gallery displays smaller, more intimate pieces dedicated to relatives. They all favour clothes that cover the body and it may be symbolic as the wax is the color of skin. Schwester (Sister, 1998) is so red, that at first sight you can’t see anything else, just that color of blood, reminding you of blood in real life, that you can associate with blood ties. It immediately brought to my mind my “bloody” sister Ilona, her temper, her tantrums, her love, all her wonderful, overwhelming self. Stepping closer and looking harder I discovered pieces of vividly colored, happy patterned, flowery or red dotted girl’s dresses in a carrousel like cavalcade. 

Gross-Tante (Great Aunt)’s dress is close to the surface and very recognizable with all the little flower patterns. My grandmother used to wear very similar ones. The clothes mostly disappear into the deepness of the wax, giving the artwork a hazy, mystical look. As Häussler stated, her works are biographies that come to her and build up in her mind. The stories emerge in relationship to the clothes she casts in wax as they disappear and reappear again and again – a fragment of a human life – briefly touching the surface, “emerging and submerging.”

It might sound like an improvised procedure but Häussler plans her pieces painstakingly. From previous experience she calculates how the textile, cotton or synthetic, will interact with the wax and how the colours will blend into it. Then she shapes the clothes, sinking them or trying to keep them closer to the surface – but, of course, there is still a role for happenstance. The final product is seen after three days when the wax has solidified and the pieces turned upside down then released from the boxes in which they were cast. The reveal holds many surprises. The most prominent of them is how painterly they are. Despite the pieces being very planned in the artist’s mind, there is always a chance through the transitioning period inside the wax that the final piece will turn out differently. Häussler starts with a concept that is mainly sculptural but ends up in the realm of painting, sometimes even in the abstract.

The central issue in her work is the person, their “fictive legacies” – as Häussler says – and not herself. She interprets her work as conservation, even as a kind of mummification that protects, stopping the movement of life. As she says, “the work I do lays in the field of associations where death is again and again very close.” It can be frightening, leading us into the territory of the unknown, the mysterious. Häussler creates a strange balance in between those worlds when ordinary objects go through a metamorphosis, breaking into pieces as the wax swallows some of their parts but their original substance is still there, buried deeply but still holding their entire essence. 

Images are courtesy of Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto.