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| "Jade Cove Study I" (wax, hydrocal on plywood) |
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| "Cyanophyta" (wax, hydrocal on plywood) |
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| "Succulent with Red Color Field" (glass) |
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| "Waste Line 9" (with Nathan Gorgen - acrylic, plywood, hydrocal) |
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| "Waste Line 2" (with Nathan Gorgen - acrylic, wax, hydrocal, plywood) |
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| "Queueing" detail |
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| "Queueing" detail |
Intriguiled and Mystiflighted
By Tom Wachunas
queue /kyo͞o/ (noun): 1. a line or sequence of people
or vehicles awaiting their turn to be attended to or to proceed. / 2. in
computing, a list of data items, commands, etc., stored so as to be retrievable
in a definite order, usually the order of insertion.
EXHIBIT: Queuing - a solo exhibition featuring works and site specific
installation by Molly Burke / at The Lemmon Gallery, located inside the Kent
Stark Fine Arts Building, 6000 Frank Avenue, North Canton, Ohio / THROUGH MARCH 2, 2019 / Gallery viewing hours are Monday – Friday 11 a.m.
to 5 p.m.
The title of this post is comprised of two
neologisms, offered in the playful spirit of Lewis Carroll’s “portmanteau”
words (from Through the Looking-Glass), wherein
parts of multiple words are blended to form a new one. This exhibit of works by Columbus-based Molly Burke
left me, as Humpty Dumpty might have said to Alice, intriguiled and
mystflighted – intrigued and beguiled, mystified and delighted, all at once.
A casual stroll
through the exhibit could possibly lead you to think you were looking at a
group show of three or four different artists. It’s true that I often walk into
many artists’ solo shows with an expectation of encountering works that have a
certain unified rhyme and reason about them, or some sort of consistency in
visual vocabulary and syntax - an apparent “style” in one medium. But
expectations can undermine our willingness to look deeper and be surprised.
After all, where is it written that an artist must by definition be constrained
to one method or iconography?
To better appreciate the diverse trajectories of materiality in
Burke’s art, the statement on her web site is illuminating. There she tells us,
“I observe details and the repetition
that occurs in our environment. My
artwork focuses on magnifying these observations. I am not specifically geared toward one
media, although I am attracted to materials that have a certain amount of
transparency, and change states from fluid to solid.”
Transparency and
solidified liquids. Glass, wax, and hydrocal (a type of plaster) are Burke’s
raw materials, transformed into various series of objects. They’re
comfortably-scaled enough to imagine cradling them in your hands, or running
your fingers along their lusciously tactile surfaces. They suggest, as opposed
to depict or illustrate, any number of things or phenomena including, perhaps, fertilized ova,
microorganisms, or clusters of succulent plant growths emerging from viscous
pools of wavy fluid.
Several pieces in the exhibit are
collaborative projects between Burke and her husband, Nathan Gorgen. These
fascinating, somewhat enigmatic works from their "Waste Line" series have the look of abstract puzzles in the
process of being assembled with leftover materials from their respective creative practices
– wax and hydrocal from her, wood and painted faux surfaces from him. A union
of rescued remnants given new life.
And then there’s
Burke’s compelling installation from which the title of this exhibit is derived
- “Queuing.” Within this gallery there is a rectangular island of sorts in the
form of a very long, wide, four-walled column. Burke opted to hang no art on
the walls of this structural element of the gallery space. But the sheer
expanse of all that white emptiness serves quite effectively as a frame, drawing
your eyes downward to the floor. There at your feet you can see the entire
island surrounded by a group of white hydrocal forms cast from balloons.
Some are intact,
some slightly cracked, others broken into pieces like shattered chinaware. Yet
there they are, a population lined up on the floor at the base of that
monolithic column, as if in a procession, or standing at attention. At one
point there’s a gap in the line. On the wall above the gap there’s a shelf. On
it are three of the balloon forms – one red, one white, one blue. They don’t
sit on the shelf so much as delicately hover there, seemingly poised on a
sliver of air. Metaphor for a fragile democracy? I imagined that if I blew on
these cryptic balloons hard enough, they’d fall over.
Then I imagined a
perplexed Alice asking Humpty Dumpty, “What are
these?!” The jolly egg - himself no stranger to being toppled - smiles a
wry smile and says, “Why, they’re cryptaloons, of course.”
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