pres·ence n: 1. the physical existence of somebody in a particular place 2. somebody who inspires awe and respect.
Female Presence
By Amie Robinson
Presence is explored through the language of abstraction in the work of the fifteen artists. Included in the exhibition are Louise Bourgeois, Jay DeFeo, Sonia Delaunay, Elaine de Kooning, Nancy Grossman, Grace Hartigan, Hannah H�ch, Lee Krasner, Yayoi Kusama, Joan Mitchell, I.Rice Pereira, Susana Solano, Pat Steir, Alma Thomas, and Marlene Tseng Yu. Representing a cross of generations and artistic styles from Dadaism to Abstract Expressionism, these artists each investigate the existence of the self in a specific place.
Landscape informs many of the works in Presence. Joan Mitchell’s Barge Peniche, an oil painting from the Chelsea Art Museum’s permanent collection was a starting point for the concept of the exhibition, as Mitchell seeks to capture and preserve a moment, her own presence in a specific time and place, translating skies and lakes into dark muted tones of white with somber stanzas of blue. She describes the white as an absolute silence, remembering "mid-west snow" and "icy blue shadows." Alma Thomas captures the beauty and light of foliage, such as an inspirational holly tree in her yard, into bright red mosaic pattern in Scarlet Sage Dancing a Whirling Dervish. Several artists interpret landscape in terms of flux, representing constant change with bold gestures of viscous paint or multiple layers of thinned mediums. Pat Steir turns the "drip," an icon of Abstract Expressionism, into the image of a waterfall. The painting Red, White and Gray Waterfall reflects not only a state of constant change in the landscape, it also represents change for the individual. Steir sees the waterfall as a metaphor for both birth and death, because "a waterfall is always beginning and always ending, and never beginning and never ending."
In other work, place is portrayed as a social or psychological space in drawings through masses of line and obsessive, repetitious marks that seek to overwhelm the pictorial space and visualize anxieties. Louise Bourgeois explores social landscape and the role of the individual in society in her early stratified ink drawings. Bourgeois uses energetic, tightly woven marks that resemble hair. This protective hair "is like a caterpillar in a cocoon. But hair is friendlier in that the cocoon eliminates the subject." Her bronze sculpture Quarantania deliberately crowds its elements and visualizes an overwhelming presence that creates a tension among objects, suggesting that for the individual "faced with outside threats there is safety in numbers, but inside such an enclave there is never lasting security or peace." Yayoi Kusama’s work explores her own presence within a frenzied world of spots and is driven by her experiences of patterned hallucinations. The two drawings included in Presence, are insights into an inner landscape of polka dots, the vision of fear that she describes as "depersonalization."
Individual existence in a place in time is explored in autobiographical collage and assemblage that re-contextualize personal history. Lee Krasner recycles earlier cubist influenced charcoal and oil drawings and collages them onto canvas in works such as Present Conditional from her series Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See. Krasner compares her style of abstraction to a pendulum moving through time. Even her titles create a new space, where there is no distinguishing elements of time, and where the past, present and future all subsist in the moment. Nancy Grossman, one of the pioneers in using industrial materials in collaged, mixed media assemblage, feels that "collage exists within ourselves, responding to, reflecting noises, rhythms, in our work and objects. I realized that objects bring their own energy, and that things can make themselves like the archeological digs of life." Her collage assemblage, Vom Ertrunkenen M�dchen, is inspired by a poem from Bertolt Brecht.
The fifteen artists in Presence all command respect as artists who began their groundbreaking careers in the art world between the 1920’s and the 1970’s, and, undeterred by gender obstacles, laid the groundwork for the feminist art movement to follow.
