Sylvia Wald Challenges Convension
By Fu Chia-Wen Lien
The recent wave and renewal of abstract expressionism and surrealism sweeping the New York galery scene has opened doors for emerging and re-emerging artists alike. The encounter with Sylvia Wald: Polymorphs, a recent exhibit at the Tenri Gallery curated by the art historian Thalia Vrachopoulos, was an experience full of surprises and learning.
Wald uses both traditional material (plaster and wire) for sculpture and the traditional female craft (textile and handicraft) of weaving. She manipulates and processes them while transforming their function and domain creatively to cross the boundaries of their defined role. The interchange between sculpture and weaving is her challenge to the division and hierarchy of the male and the female in the artistic tradition. Likewise, the contrast of manmade and natural are constantly struggling in her art to create a bizarre tension of beauty, strength and energy.
Wald has been making art in a consistent style, with intense conceptual interest and visual strength since the 30s, yet she has remained surprisingly unknown. Wald’s pieces are in the permanent collections of many well known museums nationwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One can’t help but feel guilty for not being familiar with her works and grateful to the Tenri for featuring them presently.
Curator Dr. Vrachopoulos chose to retrospect a group of sculptures by Wald that have never before been exhibited together. The fourteen works were beautifully installed, complemented by the pristine atmosphere of the Tenri Gallery. Instead of being absorbed or becoming dwarfed by the towering twenty-foot ceilings, the power of each piece held the magnitude of the walls, and economic installation means allowed for an airy feeling. The amount of space allotted to each work made for a very engaging encounter, guiding the viewer rhythmically through the gallery.
Entering near the spectacular window installation, comprised of eight triangular, woven panels made of wire, thread, fabric, bamboo and colorful plaster, the viewer was encouraged through their placement to move toward several more intimately scaled mixed-media reliefs on the adjacent wall. Framed in plexi-glass, these relief constructions shared coloration, the greens and sanguine earthen tones, and were composed of bamboo, shamois cloth, and colored threads. Wald was clearly aware that their curling edges would interact with the background to result in rich shadows reflected both within the works themselves and onto the surrounding space.
The main gallery contained Wald’s larger scale installation sculptures, such as In Flight (2004-present, mixed media, 49"x48"x32"), Colorfun (2000-present, 60"x50"x20"), Royal Headdress (1970-Present, 50"x25"x23"). All three are wire and feather works that in their ethereal lightness and due to the dimmed lights of the gallery space, project webs of shadows on the white surfaces, imbuing the works with considerable depth and interest. An essence of flight is alluded to not only by their feathers but also through the gracefully bending forms that at times hug and float in space. Colorfun is mostly made of colored wire that peregrinates and weaves in and out like a marcel wave from a Deco era hairstyle or Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kangawa, 1826-1833 from his 36 Views of Mt. Fuji series.
Another piece entitled Cloud (1975-present, mixed media, 38"x24"x4") installed in the corner was composed of three separate pieces of metal and blue colored wire. The cloud shape hovered over the main vertical piece that incorporated another in its midst again made of blue wire. Cloud was especially intriguing while evoking the tension between nature and culture, or the manmade and natural, in a piece that in its delicacy consists mostly of atmosphere or void. Wald breaks with traditional ideas of sculpture as mass by incorporating voids into her constructions while at the same time engaging with ideic models in her conception.
Wald’s artistic production shows contact with surrealist concerns in its use of the fantastical form part animal combined with created entity, and expressionist in its use of the gesture as an expressive means. Wald has used these sources of inspiration as a point of departure to arrive at her own mature style that in Carter Radcliff’s words "is a unity." Wald often worked on the same piece for decades changing it by adding a feather or leaf, a quality that both relates to her desire for continuous creation and to the surrealist tendency for metamorphosis.
Wald’s art is striking not only in quality and quantity, but also through its unique methodology in rendering her materials optically sensuous yet conceptually rich. A work such as Woven Wall (1980-Present, mix media, 72"x54"x14") combines chicken wire, plaster and other natural materials such as feathers, thread or dried plants in a free- standing wall construction. While the wires interweave in a repetitive grid form, the whole piece expands from the restriction of the geometric frame and extends to a free flowing edge. Chicken wire, plaster and feathers allow Wald the possibility to create and maintain elasticity in her work. Nevertheless, they are materials that contain very different implications. Wires are metallic supplies suggesting technology and construction and their combination with natural materials like feathers correspondingly reflects Wald’s environment. While located in an urban center, her living quarters indoors retain a natural atmosphere full of plants, orchids and birds. For Wald, the urge to unite with nature seems to be even stronger than the constraint and impact of modern life. The beauty of nature, like the subtle colorful patterns and textures of feathers, cries to be freed from the screen’s web whose wires she often smears with plaster to cover their cold metallic mien. In fact, because Wald colors her chicken wire with pastel pigments it can almost be read as some kind of natural material such as thread.
