In Review

Mary Judge and Robin Hill at Flipside, and
Sheila Moss at Roebling Hall
by Suzanne Wise

Nightfishers, Sheila Moss, 2000

Salt Deposit, Sheila Moss, 2000

Marrow Drawing, Shiela Moss, 2000

Everyone who’s an artist knows art is a gamble. Unlike what the capitalist American god tells us, hard work doesn’t necessarily translate to success. One way to handle the bad news is to become a creative gambler, to embrace chance.

The dictionary says chance is "A supposedly existing force not subject to any recognized law. Often personified, as in, 'chance could not rule the world'." Chance might not rule the world (I beg to differ) but it has long been a tool of rebellion for artists. In two recent Williamsburg shows, three artists reveal their collaboration with chance, throwing down the reins to varying degrees: Roebling Hall hosted Sheila Moss’s solo show "Preprioception" November 11 to December 4, while Flipside presented "Phlat Stuff," flat works by Mary Judge and Robin Hill, on view November 5 to December 17.

At first glance "Preprioception" would appear to be the opposite of welcoming to chance. Sculpture, drawings and two very different wall installations all demonstrate great formal precision. This is an artist that appears masterful in her use of disparate materials, who appears to be always absolutely in charge.

However, with Moss’s work, what’s perceived from a distance or at first glance often turns out to be something else if we wait. And that second, closer look often reveals remnants of a process that allows materials free and unpredictable play (chance!).

The muse of the show is the swirly cochlea or inner ear as manifested metaphorically and visually. The sense of equilibrium provided by the inner ear is essential to preprioception, the sixth sense that collaborates with the other senses in order to perceive environment and the things or bodies lodged within it. Moss’s show both celebrates and fucks with equilibrium. Not so much to disorient but to require us to empathically imagine the world from another angle (the world’s angle!), and to recognize the new possibilities that result from patient attention.

One example is "Salt Deposit," a rectangular, horizontal glass sculpture that hangs from the ceiling. It is symmetrically paned like windows or a glass door and we must bend backward to see the aftermath of salt water that had been poured and has since dried up. What remains is a coating of salt in cochlea-shaped swirls and arcs. The salt paths resembled the eelish footprints of a flood, an iced-over stream bed, or a roiling sky.

Obviously, water splashed onto glass is a chance operation. Where the water goes and how the dried salt will form is out of the hands of the artist. The position of the glass recepticle for the pour requires the viewer to readjust her body in order to look at it; in this way, standard perceptions of the world get called into question. What would it be like to see a stream from underneath it? One viewer lay down on the gallery floor for better alignment. The view is shapely and cloudily obscuring at once.

Like "Salt Deposit," "Marrow Drawings" carries with it the history of its chancy process. These gorgeous penciled portraits of bones appear to have been carefully, symmetrically arranged and layered to mimic flowers, leaves or genitalia. On second glance, the colorless bones look familiar, like chips of color arranged flatly vertical at the round end of a horizontal kaleidoscope (creator of artificial, abstract landscapes, false mimicer of the long-ranging telescope). And, in actuality, the composition was the result of using a huge kaleidoscope filled with bones. The swirl of the kaleidoscope (cochlea acting like a verb) provides a ghost layer to the stillness of the end product.

Speaking of which, despite the liveliness of these pieces, there is an element of elegy. We don’t get ocean, we get its salt. We don’t get body, we get bones. The presentations are tidy, pristine, laboratorylike. We experience observations about nature but not nature itself. The life of this art lies in the mind and hand of the artist.

"Nebula" is one piece that gets caught in the artist’s private realm and doesn’t quite translate. Spreading over three walls in cochlealike swirls, "Nebula" consisted of fake flowers with wiry stems and shiny petals. Beautiful scalloped shadows emphasized the precision of each artificial blossom. Moving closer, the clear petals turned out to be decaled with pictures of people: mostly white men in suits but a few people of color and a few women too. If you went over to the table by the gallery’s mailing list and the press releases, you’d find a binder providing the names and occupations of these people, who all happen to be scientists. Despite this info, I still couldn’t quite make an interesting connection. Nature vs. Science? Science Nerds are Wallflowers?

The most exciting work was "Night Fishers." Separated off from the gallery with curtains, a bright room was filled with q-tips that hung on strings. The strings had been attached to swervy, curving narrow planks of wood that are mounted on the ceiling. A fan stirred the strings so that the q-tips appeared as waving little bones. (One carries associations from one piece to another.) Then suddenly the lights snapped off and little glowing nubs of white began to pop out of the dark and glow. This time we see materials--cotton swabs dipped in phosphorescent paint--operating on their own and in the act of transformation.

Looking up at them from below, they appeared as falling, luminescent snow in some night dream where the snow never hits the ground. Or stars. Or fireflies. The strings were hung in such a way as to create pathways. When I was there some people got giddy and ran through them, tangling up the strings.

I like "Night Fishers" because it invites the viewer into its space and so viewing gets combined with touch and navigation. Also "Night Fishers" is elegant, as are the other pieces in the show, but also intimate with the human mundane. After all, its primary feature is a tool for scraping the wax out of ears. This installation also feels less removed and clinical than the other pieces. Which is to say, though the facility of the artist for making beautiful and complicated things drives the piece, her skillfulness melts away to experience. We don’t contemplate a beautiful object. Instead, we move around inside it, in the dark. At Flipside, works by Mary Judge and Robin Hill looked pretty different from each other. Judge creates concentric, symmetrical abstract drawings. Hill creates murky photographic pieces. What do they share? Well, for one thing, processes that integrate chance.

Judge’s half of the show consists of 45 small drawings hung on three walls of the gallery. The drawings are actually blobby, rounded, symmetrical shapes composed of a myriad of concentric dotted lines. And at the center of each is a variable blank heart .... shaped like a bone or a butterfly (that’s been flattened between the pages of a book) or a Keith Harringesque tiny body with no legs and extra limbs.

The hint of chance can be detected in the small variations of the very similar designs and the application of ink to create the tiny dots. Some drawings are neat, delicate and tidy in their lineation. Others bear smudges where the lines bend and gather, giving the drawing a sort of chiaroscuro-ish, muscular throb. Some of these are so inky the lines appear buried in shadow. As for color, some are sepia-toned, reminiscent of swollen old parchments or maps. Others are grayish or purplish like evidence of a leaky ball-point pen or a blue print.

Mary Judge uses the technique of pouncing to create these pieces, which are called spolvero drawings. Employed by embroiderers, lace makers and engravers in days of old, pouncing is the transference of a pattern to paper by means of pushing powdered ink through teeny holes. In Judge’s process, the amount of ink that oozes through the holes can’t quite be controlled; each drawing is unpredictable.

To the pouncing, Hill added a recipe for symmetry: a design is pricked into one quarter of a folded paper so that the design is replicated on the three other halves. The paper is then unfolded and ink applied to the entire surface. The obsessiveness of the repetitive process and the insistence on symmetry make the accidents of ink application appear less of a free-for-all and more of a way to widen the vocabulary of what appears to be a central motif for Judge.

Most of the drawings were the size of a small notepad or a shingle but fatter. They seemed meant to be held or placed in a special box. A thing to be coveted. There were also a few among the bunch that wore the thin skin of transparent Chinese practice paper, complete with red characters and thin red grids. In some ways the drawings could be considered drafts for a final version that never takes place. And the dotted lines a language without an alphabet like Chinese. Unfortunately, the drawings with the tracing paper come across as a bit fussy. Icing on a kind of cake that shouldn’t have icing. Otherwise, the blotty shadows and sharp tattoo of dots keeps these works from being too pretty or precious. So what’s delivered is perforated, vulnerable, flawful and yet quietly radiant.

On the other side of the room, a cyanotype by Robin Hill covers an entire wall and drips down onto the floor. A cyanotype is a photographic image created by holding an object against blueprint paper, which develops the image using a very long exposure. Hill used natural light to develop the image of a paper bag, in different crumpled postures, again and again. The amount of sun on a given day effects the degree to which the image is developed. The source of chance thus is fickle nature.

The result is a deep-marine blue surface with softly glowing, crinkled forms that seems to bob and skim against the surface. Occasionally a white knife-sharp edge cuts through. The large scale of the work combined with the mysteriousness of the bag--which is not immediately recognizeable (flower heads? human body parts? clouds? debris strewn in an ocean or a sky or consciousness itself?) — produced a gently turbulent dreamscape. But the paper on which the bag images appear was wrinkled in places reminding us that this blue-drenched world is a pasted piece of artifice, a human-touched thing. The piece as a whole felt to me somewhat less than whole, a bit incomplete. Like a theatrical backdrop for something absent.

A group of 5 or 6 small cyanotypes accompanied the wall piece. Each is tinted the same deep blue but here the items are more discernible: a glass, a ribbon of some sort, lids of cans or bottles. For the most part, the series feels like studies and part of the game of looking at them is identifying the subject matter.

A charming little artist’s book (with a special surprise in its fold-up structure) by Hill presents the paper bag as a kind of character that gets blown around a lot. People project upon the bag, filling up its emptiness with secret longings. It strikes me that this could be a story about allowing chance into the artistic act: Chance gives artists the opportunity to empty themselves of a little ego, to let the gusty world fling intention in a new direction. Then writers get to project upon the results.

Suzanne Wise is the author of The Kingdom of the Subjunctive (Alice James Books, 2000), a collection of poetry. Her poems have also been published in the anthology American Poetry: the Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2000).