Diaphanous Realms

 

Diaphanous Realms 

Soft, early

the forever of stars

distant disturbances (detail)

distant disturbances

refracted shimmer

deep into

Rock Cloud and the Skywalkermothergoddess (detail)

Rock Cloud and the Skywalkermothegoddess

By Tom Wachunas 

EXHIBIT: Suspended Animations / work by Rebecca Cross, at STUDIO M in Massillon Museum / 121 Lincoln Way East, downtown Massillon, Ohio, THROUGH JUNE 16, 2021 / Tuesday through Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday 2:00 to 5:00 / 330.833.4061

https://massillonmuseum.org/

LEARN MORE HERE:   https://massillonmuseum.org/538

   “…I was compelled to draw elements of these invented biomorphic figures because I was curious about drawing on dyed silk fabric with equally ethereal pastels. But I also sought in these pieces the immersion of slow work over time. Placing these drawings within dyed waterscapes brought together my concerns about environmental catastrophe with the vast Lake Erie horizon, which I regularly contemplate as I think.”  -Rebecca Cross

   This marvelous exhibit (of seven large wall pieces and one sculptural installation) is among the most enthralling unions of elegant craft and compelling concept I’ve seen in recent years.

   Rebecca Cross’s large colored wall pieces (4’ x 5’) – from her recent Horizons series - are chalk pastel drawings on dyed silk. Cross writes about their intriguing translucent surfaces in her statement for the show: “… what complicates the immediate apprehension of these drawings is a reflective feature of silk organza called moiré: the curvilinear effect on the surface of the finely woven silk created when the silk is sized through caliendering presses when processed into fabric.”

   These drawings have uncanny depth, at once real and illusory. Each one appears to be comprised of two individual planes with a only a tiny bit of physical space between them – the result of draping the large piece of silk over a rod attached to the gallery wall, like a translucent curtain.

    Aqueous and ethereal, Cross’s abstractions aren’t static objects to be viewed in any casual manner. They’re not pictures in the conventional sense so much as interactive, indeed spiritual experiences. Animated moments in time. To look at them is to see into them, to partner with them, as if engaging in a kind of slow dance. As you move, they move, buoyant and breathing in a pulsing response to your relative position in space. How far away are you standing, or how near? Look up, then down. Look to the left, then right. As you alter your perspective, you become increasingly absorbed in shimmering gossamer expanses of luminous, undulating color. Look closer still, and individual linear marks come into sharper focus: flecks and squiggles, specks that wriggle into organic shapes. Ghostlike traces. Remnants. Fossils. Memories of living things.

   A similar sense of immersion in the ephemeral is even more palpable in Cross’s stunning installation called Rock Cloud and the Skywalkermothergoddess. It’s a metaphorical moment of frozen flux. Here is a consideration of nature’s mutability in the form of contrasted modes of being – solids and air, hard and soft, substance and shadow, present and past. Gravity itself seems to have been inactivated. All those weighty white stones float in a suspended state of equanimity with their blue silk counterparts that look like bubbles or tiny clouds or maybe the shed skins of former stones. Call it all a mesmerizing Erie meditation.