THE INSIDE TRACK
ESSAY by Julia Couzens
Invisible attachments — those subliminal connections, like hidden organs, that nourish the artist’s daily effort and interior life — are what Midas: How Art Becomes Life & Life Becomes Art examines and celebrates. Curated by artist Squeak Carnwath, the exhibition at Berkeley Art Center features objects of inspiration and remnants from each artist’s studio alongside finished works.
Artists work for many reasons: cultural critique, social activism, money, professional ambition, and sheer habit are just some of the motives that induce an artist into the studio. But the visceral, nameless need to work is the most urgent and sustaining reason. Thunderbolts of inspiration are for Marvel Comics and the movies. Artists know that it’s work that generates work. They know that moves generate moves. There’s nothing woo-woo or glamorous about it. But moves that surrender to mystery and the laws of sensitivity are the ones that most richly invigorate the creative process.
Almost despite themselves, artists subliminally and continuously scan for connections between real, exterior objects and the problems of their work. They remain ever alert to the impulses and continuous sensations of the universal world. Their eyes are in constant touch with fortuitous phenomena and intermediary entities that link these sensations to creative reverie and drive. However humble or “low” those objects may be — a water stain, say, or a colorful glob of lint — to the artist, their value as creative talisman or exploratory goads is without measure. To the artist the material world is all grist, and either everything has potential value, or nothing does.
Enter an artist’s studio or other creative habitat and you may find objects seemingly without connection to the work at hand. Oddments that for whatever reason need to be there. Even the artist may not totally grasp their logic or meaning, treasuring them more for their mystery and their power as agents or wordless gurus to the alchemy that is creative practice. To the extent Midas presents the artists’ studio remnants with their works of art, the exhibition serves as a surrogate, if acutely abbreviated, studio visit.
Ricki Dwyer’s sculptures are elegantly spare, dissonate odes to the slippage between metaphor and function. Swags of hand-dyed and woven textiles loop, drip, and sag over wire or from the wall without naming anything, blurring the distinction between seeing something and experiencing the body. Stains of dye comingle with loosely woven fiber, soaking up breath and triggering speculations with multiple coordinates. Gravity, light, and space are all in play. The economy of Dwyer’s language is echoed in the splices of Robert Morris’s terse words used by Dwyer to create a poem on the body, intimacy, and space.
Linda Geary brings raucous exuberance with her pushy paintings in a continuous loop of colliding shapes jockeying for position and a voice in the room. Her delightfully ad hoc stack of studio chairs embodies the play of balance underpinning her paintings’ joyously teetering compositions. Geary choreographs cutting, revision, and repair to piece together patterns and forms that appear to build up, fall apart, reboot, and try again. This compositional circuitry implicates Geary’s assimilation of the ever-shifting and contingent world in which we live. If times are fraught and a pot of anguish rests on the mantel, then witnessing a wedge of green pick Payne’s gray pocket is a soul-soothing diversion.
Maria Guzmán Capron performs a sort of day-care plastic surgery to the extent she cuts, stuffs, stitches and sutures paint, string, cardboard, garbage bags, and flayed remaindered clothing into child-like bodily forms. Outsized scale or miniaturization lends a degree of fairy-tale theater to her constructions. The coterie of playful ceramic figurines representing dialogue with Guzmán Capron’s studio bring fable and dreamtime to her multilayered work. Yet the work’s raw, unpolished fabrication belies Guzmán Capron’s nuanced commentary on societal classifications and hierarchies. Material choices are crafted from her fluency with the way culture codes and parses value.
A little chair and sun-protective umbrella is the studio for Sahar Khoury’s dog, Esther. Pets napping in a corner basket or snoozing on the floor have been abiding companions to artists for centuries. Wordlessly riding shotgun, they season the studio with their ineffable animal acuity. Khoury deploys materials requiring an outdoor practice, hence Esther’s need for shade. Clay, cement, resins, papier-mâché, steel, and found objects compose Khoury’s resolute sculpture. Bearing the marks of her hand, the sculpture has a sense of bodily immediacy. The charm and gesture of the jerry-rigged umbrella engagingly quotes the sculpture’s palm trees, while Khoury’s structural rigor provides formal scaffolding for her intuitive meditations on personal history and community.
A cannonball (c. seventeenth – eighteenth century) and forked measuring stick serve as Jerry Leisure’s studio fragment. The objects are profoundly simple, even elemental. Yet laden with the heft of time, their gravitas is palpable. Leisure’s reductive polychromed wood sculptures are kindred spirits to their simplicity and power, but with twenty-first century wit. A skillfully honed head sprouting a mask-like duck’s bill, the head resting nonsensically on a rocking table, or an equally honed head ominously wearing a sort of ventilator float murky personal and collective issues. They are precisely articulated exemplars of streamlined craft.
Kyle Lypka and Tyler Cross have forged a collaborative creative relationship outside their individual artistic practices. Working with dense timber-like clay extrusions, their sculpture demonstrates gravity in relation to weight and mass. Yet the truncated figuration of their work signals humor and whimsy. To the extent the work raises questions about use and decorative ornamentation they are ingeniously subversive. A colloquy between ceramic glaze test pieces and miniature figural studies provides a sort of core sample of their evolving studio experimentation.
John Moore does not separate art and life. His home and studio are one. His work begins where he sits and where he stands. Every wall and table, shelf, nook, and counter are laden with his paintings, drawings, collages, sculpture, and curated collections of objects. For Moore a table is art is a table, and over the decades he has transformed his house into a resplendent grotto of art. Moore equalizes his materials, using fabric remnants, concert playbills, scrap wood, and paint to construct works that mutter and bristle with text. His scope is restless with conversational asides and exhortations, visually riffing off the river of life.
It’s a privilege to visit artists’ private working spaces and to see them at their most vulnerable and with their guards down. It’s in the studio that we see the artist’s inside track: what’s in the air and on their minds. Nothing is more generous. That generosity informs the spirit and curatorial intention of Midas.
Julia Couzens is a California-based artist and writer. A graduate of the University of California, Davis (MFA), she has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. Notable public collections include: The Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts; Berkeley Art Museum; Crocker Art Museum; Manetti Shrem Museum; Weatherspoon Art Museum; and Yale University Art Gallery. Her critical writing has appeared in Ceramics: Art and Perception; SquareCylinder; Two Coats of Paint; and numerous exhibition catalogues.