"One Illuminates the Other" Marion Held at Art Resources Transfer
is the palest light of all…. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering,
whether I have lived my life or dreamed it." Eugène Ionesco
Marion Held works in the twilight zone between dark and light, between memory and dream, and between the real and the surreal. Though non-representational at times, her work has always referenced the human form. In the past she created habitats, receptacles, and open cavities that contained votive body parts, fossils or unspecified pod like forms.
Held’s exhibition at Art Resource Transfer is divided into two segments: the first (January 2003) is composed primarily of drawings, whereas the second (May 2003) showcases her sculpture.
The Topography series exhibits luxuriant "bonescapes." With black charcoal marks on earthy-orange background, these five gestural drawings reveal mountainous bone structure and vessels.
Both drawings and sculpture inform each other, or as the exhibition title suggests, one illuminates the other.
Double Droop (2002), consists of cast-rubber round forms molded into two cylindrical head-like structures accompanied by twisted wire cords that droop in the foreground. Though not heads as such, they assume the character of faceless people wrapped in a headscarf, each with a single braid suspended in front of their featureless face.
Hiddeness (2001) continues the artist’s signature work. Embedding clay pods in an amber colored cast-rubber half-sphere, Held creates an ambiguous juxtaposition of opaqueness and translucency. But, it is the detailed vertebrae-like element perched on top of one of the pods that startles and invites the viewer to examine the piece closely.
Translucent amber light serves as a background stage in the very same way Samuel Beckett used absolute darkness to sculpt the stage space. And not unlike Beckett’s economic use of light, Held’s own theatre of the absurd owes its strength to the powerful and uncanny minute surreal element–vertebrae, twisted cord or a lock of hair–present in each sculpture.
