Spoken from the Inside
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| "When You Wake You Will Have Cake" / 2019, cast paper |
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| "Im Reading Them Again, the Ones You Didn't Burn" / cast paper |
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| "Born in a Diaspora" / 2018, cast paper |
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| "Beast of Burden" / 2018, bronze |
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| "We Would Have Listened If We Had Known" / 2019, bronze and cast paper |
By Tom Wachunas
“…The birds are infused with my experience
of prison, but not in the sense that birds are free. Flight for birds is not
freedom; they fly to avoid death…” - Treacy Ziegler
EXHIBIT: States of Waiting - work by Treacy Ziegler / at Massillon Museum
Studio M, THROUGH AUGUST 11, 2019 /
The Massillon Museum is located at 121 Lincoln Way, East (Ohio 172) in downtown
Massillon. A visit to the Massillon Museum is always free. Call the Massillon Museum at 330-833-4061 or
visit www.massillonmuseum.org for more information.
Ziegler writes the
online art journal, "Broad Street Review," which can be read at:
I viewed this
sculpture exhibit weeks ago. It’s been haunting me ever since. Like a
persistent sort of psychospiritual stalker. Many times I’ve asked my relentless
pursuer, “what is it you want of me?” Each time the answer is the same: “Your wonderment.” And so here I succumb.
Treacy Ziegler
describes an intriguing progression in her statement for this show: from seeing
a science display of birds mounted in glass cases, to making drawings of those
birds, and then on to bronze sculptures of the birds. “…I wanted to hold this
round form in my hands,” she has written, and further on, “…I did not know why,
but shortly after seeing the birds, I felt compelled to go into prisons…”
That would lead to
her teaching art in prisons, and establishing Prisoner Express, a through-the-mail entity affiliated with Cornell
University which has enabled her to create projects for prisoners throughout
the U.S. She receives approximately 20,000 letters from prisoners annually.
This in turn led Ziegler to make additional sculptures in paper, cast from
those letters. Rather than throwing the prisoners’ missives away, incorporating
them into her sculptures of animals is, as she states, “…more respectful to the
loneliness, hope, despair, and gratitude often reflected in the letters.”
Yes, there’s much
to wonder about here, much beyond the pale of comfortable certainty. What are
we to make of those big sheep forms made from the paper of prisoners’ letters? Sheep.
Docile, dominated, destined to be shorn. Or slaughtered? In “When You Wake You
Will Have Cake,” 24 sheep heads are lined up on long shelves along two walls of
the gallery. This stark procession of creatures with mouths clenched shut and
eyes like unfathomable caverns might well be a metaphor for the
societally-sanctioned subculture of institutionalized apartheid and diaspora
that we call prisons.
And what of those
birds? Guardians, or hunters? Overseers of dreams and messengers of freedom, or
harbingers of despair and futility? There’s a riveting conflation of opposing
forces, of conflicted states of living, resonant in Zeigler’s pieces. They
exude a kind of timeless, primal rawness and spirituality that reminds me of
ancient totems, effigies, or idols.
‘States of
Waiting,” Ziegler has titled this arrested (and arresting) body of work. Yet
again I wonder: waiting for what, or whom, exactly? And who’s doing the waiting? The artist? The
prisoners she encounters? The artworks themselves, seeking our gaze? Can
‘waiting’ be more than merely serving time, and instead become a creative act -
a potentially fruitful prelude to catharsis, to transformation?
Or maybe it’s us,
the viewers, who are ultimately the ones waiting. In all of its metaphorical
symbolism, in all the questions or enigmas it may raise in our minds and
hearts, this is truly compelling art. Looking at it is indeed to enter a state
of waiting.
So we wait. We wait
and watch. And we watch until our surrender to the simple act of willful seeing
becomes a state of…wonderment.
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