ART REVIEW: "Couples" and Susan Mikula's "American Vale" at the Ferrin Gallery

FERRIN GALLERY

Couples

Susan Mikula: American Vale

 

by Tresca Weinstein

 

There's so much talent on view at the Ferrin Gallery, in Pittsfield, Mass., that it threatens to overflow its boundaries. You'll have to poke your head into the back office to see the last few paintings of Couples, hanging between calendars and bulletin boards, but make sure to do so—it's worth it.

 

The conceit of Couples is that all the work is made by artists who are married or in a relationship, and the layout of the show allows us to make connections between the individual members of a pair. The range of work among the nine couples represented, all from the Berkshire and Pioneer Valley regions, includes whimsical sculpture, portraits, fantastical photographs, still life that pops off the canvas, and two enchanting three-dimensional miniature houses by Roy and Mara Superior.

 

Roy Superior's Olive Museum seems as if it must have been as much fun to make as it is to look at. Double doors open on a tiny display case holding teensy sculpted olive specimens—oldest olive, petrified olive, speckled olive, etc.—above which hangs a giant floating olive that recalls the famous life-size blue whale hanging in the Museum of Natural History. Mara Superior's sculpture is not just any house, it's the Obama White House, a porcelain piece topped like a giant cake with the president's head, its base decorated with little plates painted with the administration's goals.

 

The artistic links between most of the other couples are equally evident; one wonders whether they were drawn to each other by their similar sensibilities or whether their work has gradually come closer together after years of sharing a home and, in some cases, a studio. Katia Santibanez and James Siena both make intricately patterned abstractions; hers resemble ethnic textiles, his look like densely packed mazes. The haunting eyes in the face at the center of Sergei Isupov's charcoal drawing, During 18th Century, mirror those in the porcelain sculpture Dew Drop, the artist's collaboration with Kadri Pärnamets. Nancy Hill and Randall Diehl both take kitschy subjects—a row of toys, a shrine to the Red Sox, an old-fashioned diner—and subtly suggest layers and stories beneath the deceptively simple scenarios. Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison cocreate their dreamy, entrancing photographs, such as Summer Arm, in which an arm braced in what looks a medieval torture device sprouts flowers and butterflies.

 

Less obviously connected, Scott Prior's hyper-realistic pencil and graphite portrait of his wife, Nanny Vonnegut, hangs beside Vonnegut's All Things Under Mirror, a collection of sixty-three odd and mundane objects: a snowman, an alien, a birdcage, Mickey Mouse, a tornado, a set of chattering wind-up teeth. You can't draw easy parallels, either, between Monika Sosnowski's photos, which capture bright flashes of color—a red dress, a robin's-egg-blue dustpan—and Peter Dudek's minimalist sculpture, Cliff Dwelling #1, which pairs curving wooden shapes with angular metal lines.

 

 

Tucked in a corner are a hand-painted sign and a small LED box by Jenny Holzer, by far the best-known artist in the show, whose work is hung next to her husband Michael Glier's expressionistic cityscapes, bursting with thick palette-knife strokes and luscious colors. Interestingly, Holzer's work is the least intriguing in the show—her box should come with a warning ("Attempting to readthis may cause nausea") and the accompanying sign sports one of her typical pseudo-profundities. So much more beautiful and provocative are Janet Rickus' still life paintings in oil: a row of luscious, glowing lemons, a group of sweet potatoes nestling sensuously into each other. They make lovely complements to Warner Friedman's trompe l'oeil windows, opening onto serene vistas of river and forest.

 

Speaking of couples, photographer Susan Mikula's significant other is MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, and Mikula's latest series, American Vale, a follow-up to her American Device, has economic and political underpinnings. American Device documented working plants in Southern California and Texas, while American Vale takes a narrower focus: the industrial facilities of the General Electric Corporation in Pittsfield, some of which were literally deconstructed before Mikula had even taken the last photos.

 

In light of her subject matter, it makes perfect artistic sense that Mikula chose to shoot with Polaroid cameras and (by necessity) expired film, using only available light. The images are printed on rag paper (manufactured locally at Crane & Co. in Dalton, Massachusetts) and mounted on aluminum; several are printed on ceramic plates and lockets. The images Mikula produced, which have not been cropped or retouched, look at first glance like paintings left out in the rain to accumulate a blurriness and patina that usually come only with age.

 

On closer examination, however, they reveal distinctive and separate identities. From the washes of green and yellow emerge very different moods and allusions: a Japanese temple glimpsed through mist, the prow of a giant ship. Some, with blocks and splotches of darker color, read like Rorschach blots; others like abstract paintings. Though they are meant to be viewed from a distance, like Monet paintings, up close you can see the stippling of tiny cracks on their surfaces, conveying a sense of history that reflects that of the fast-disappearing places they capture.

 

 

Tresca Weinstein is a contributing editor to Berkshire Living and BerkshireLive's art critic.