Fragments of Figures

Wednesday, November 03, 2010  JH Weekly

By Matthew Irwin

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player.
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage.”
Act V, Scene V in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Inanimate objects contain memories. They have personalities, imposed by the persons who own them or view them; ask anyone who hands down heirlooms or collects souvenirs, anyone who describes an archetypal character by the clothes. Ask painter Jennifer Rasmusson or sculptor Jen Harmon Allen: the two will be in Jackson Hole this week to hang their two-women show at the Art Association, to teach mixed-media art classes and to talk about their work.

Harmon Allen’s serious, monochromatic installations couldn’t be more opposite from Rasmusson’s brightly colored abstract paintings, and yet the two became friends when Rasmusson called Harmon Allen to swap works. They hadn’t met, but the same gallery represented both of them. Harmon Allen agreed, she said, because of their shared interest in “fragments of figures.” The phrase depicts a piece she’ll hang in the ArtSpace Gallery, called “Mountain of Measure” – some 365 pairs of five-inch-tall plaster feet hiking single file up a set of imaginary switchbacks – and to some degree her other installation, “Armor Dresses,” that depicts the “little black dress” in iron fencing and ceramics.

Clothes, more so than other inanimate objects, imply an identity, or attitude, for their owners that they don’t necessarily control. For example, I’ve developed a particular style reliant on hats, scarves, boots and sportscoats (of various textures, colors and layers required by my mood or the occasion) that look good together, but I admit that I defiantly (however occasionally and subtly) attempt to provoke conventional attitudes on attire. On a recent trip to New York City, however – unpracticed and underprepared – I had my boot-cut-Lucky-Jeans-wearing ass handed to me first by Metropolitan Opera subscribers, then by swanky Greenwich Village clubbers and finally by a pretentious Greenpoint indie record shop owner (yes, “pretentious” is redundant, and yes, that diss hurt the most).

The threads meant to undermine highbrow and lowbrow up-nosery indeed earned attention, but rather than demonstrate that culture can’t be determined by income level or social expectation, I earned the distinction of being somebody “other.” The clothes had become confining.

I’m using hyperbole here to make a point about art in general: though I can find something relatable to my life in Harmon Allen’s work – or a common thread between the Jens’ artistic impulses – the application of artistic perspective to everyday dilemmas and experiences, like the act of writing an essay, pulls from the obscure imaginings of our minds workable approaches to living in a civilization. Rasmusson describes her process as a conversation, another word I find useful when describing the “function” of art in a math-and-science society.

The story told by Rasmusson’s work begins with a young artist interested in whimsical realism: inanimate objects detailed and portrayed over patterns found on wrapping paper or wallpaper. She held a particular fascination with birds, flowers and cupcakes that have a sort of scrapbook aesthetic. She told me over the phone that she found the idea of a cupcake levitating comical. The takeaway from those early years, however, was her use of texture, pattern and color. “Anything with great color needs to be painted, and maybe even exaggerated,” she said. After a very traditional art school education shaped her into “an art snob who didn’t even look at abstract work,” Rasmusson attended Dundas Valley School of Art in Ontario, where her classmates asked her if she knew of or studied any living artists. “I looked at Richard Diebenkorn and really got it,” she said. “The draw of abstract to me is it’s very hard. I love the challenge of it. And I like the pure elements, just color and texture and value.”

In place of the patterns she once painted, Rasmusson carries themes and ideas from one painting to the next. She uses plaster for texture, and because a “huge collage period” created a cache of paper, photographs and found objects, she occasionally pulls some of those materials into her new work. “They kind of become the language, part of the conversation of the painting,” she said, and that conversation involves a lot of listening and compromising with the materials until she feels she created something that’s always been there. “If I can make a painting look like it’s coming out of the surface, instead of painted on top of the surface, then that’s successful,” she said.

Though she doesn’t want to peg herself as an abstract or a realistic artist, the collection she’s bringing to the Art Association is “very abstract,” she said, with some figurative works, as well. She created 10 pieces over the last year, originally interested in pursuing walking and movement as the overarching theme, while creating individual narratives for each piece, represented in the textures. But because she worked simultaneously on all 10, she saw the textures overlapping, so she became more interested in the idea of memories, “how they change and overlap with other memories. And how they’re refined or more faded and have a deeper texture after that,” she said. “I’m using a lot of texture, oil and acrylic on top, and a lot of layering and pushing back and scraping back, and so I feel like it’s creating memories.”

Preparing for the Art Assoc. show, Rasmusson accepted one of Harmon Allen’s dresses “to live with while painting, and so that dress form kind of comes through in a few of them,” which seems odd considering the stark contrast between the dress – heavy, serious – and Rasmusson’s use of color and levity, but which also serves as a metaphor for the relationship between the two artists and between their arts. Rasmusson takes things from the world around her and tries to bring them in. She’s the kind of artist who paints things she finds pleasing, and challenges herself to represent them definitively, in a way that shares her enthusiasm, which might explain why she came to the impermanence of memory, that opposite of realistic art, as her subject. What doesn’t fade with enough time?
Harmon Allen doesn’t take the relationship as literally.

For her the work is about ideas that she wants to convey, about how we perceive or misperceive the value of things and ourselves. She finds the color in Rasmusson’s work inspiring, and she hopes to somehow incorporate some color into her installations – “the install” she said is the real art of what she does – but I think her enjoyment of Rasmusson’s work is more about returning her to the world of solid things after mining her raw material from abstract and academic contemplations on the human body. Harmon Allen is the one, after all, who suggested as a name for the show “Walking Shadows,” after the line in Macbeth offered as the epigraph to this story. Her casts in “Mountain of Measure”, bone white legs will also be walking shadows, being as they are cut off at the knee, only suggestions or memories of humans.

“Mountain of Measure” is derived from academic studies of the human figure. Harmon Allen wanted to make sculptures that depicted the spirit or soul of the figure instead of just the surface detail of the skin. She attributes this interest to her high school days as a dancer, when she discovered that the body could be “a signifier or means for sending a message or creating a statement.” At Wellesley, she studied under Carlos Dorrien, who made “tall figurative pieces in granite, just huge monolithic sculptures. He said something along the lines of ‘You describe the body better when you don’t give every detail.’ That really stuck with me,” she said.

While making plaster casts from a mold, Harmon Allen got used to the early renditions coming out broken or full of holes. Nonetheless, she found it difficult to throw the imperfect limbs out, and finally realized that the fragments were more interesting than “the academic thing that sits on a pedestal,” she said. “For thousands of years, people have been making sculptures of women standing on a pedestal.” She resurrected the broken casts and multiplied them, and now they will hang in ArtSpace in an attempt to capture “movement through space, capture time, and our bodies’ interaction with nature.” “Mountain of Measure” will take up the majority of the space, she said.

Her other installation will be a series of life-size dresses made of ceramics and steel, for which she’s developed her own “clay, body, glaze recipe,” she said. “Usually when you fire in a kiln, you just have clay in there, but I have steel fencing wire as my base for the sculpture, and I add clay on to it, and it’s pretty hard to get them to fire together and not get them to sort of want to break apart from each other.” Her recipe results in the steel and clay appearing to bond, making them look oxidized or aged underwater. 

The idea for the dresses came to Harmon Allen in 2000. She’s always been concerned with the female figure, she said, and with a “somewhat feminist background” at Wellesley, became interested in the idea of dressing up to present an altered perception of self. I was thinking specifically about the little black dress and the power suit,” she said. “So when I made a little black dress out of steel and ceramic material, it ended up looking sort of precious, like a little treasure I found, but they also looked like armor, like something not comfortable to wear. I love the tension and beauty that clothing is on the one hand, but it also can control us and confine and define us in ways we’re sometimes uncomfortable with.”

Without being inhabited by a human, the dresses still suggest the female figure. They have an identity based on suggestion, almost as if they stole a woman’s shape from her. “I never felt like describing [the female figure] in full detail is the ultimate, the ends of my expression,” Harmon Allen said. “It feels like just the beginning.”

Rasmusson and Harmon Allen arrived Monday to begin hanging their exhibition at the Art Association. Harmon Allen is teaching a mixed-media sculpture workshop that began on Tuesday. Rasmusson will teach a mixed-media painting workshop on Saturday and Sunday. Their show will hang together until Dec. 30. Their works should be comfortable with each other by now, having hung together in the artists’ homes, though space may force them closer together than they’re accustomed. Viewers, finally, will have to determine whether to consider the pieces as individual works or as part of an ephemeral accident that takes in consideration the ideas of the works and of all the people in the room. Will patrons judge the paintings and sculptures in terms of their own ideas, as supportive or contrary, or will they think twice about, at the very least, tucking in and buttoning up their shirts for the Met Opera?

‘Feet on the ground’ by Jennifer Rasmusson

                ARTS

Painter, Sculptor converse

about time, body

By  Katy Niner

from the Jackson  Hole news and Guide

Two Utah artists have woven their
ideas about the body and time
into a lively conversation that
continues with visitors' experiences of
their show at the Art Association.
Sculptor Jen Harmon Allen and
painter Jennifer Rasmusson converge
on Jackson for their fi rst shared show,
"Walking Shadows," which opens Friday
and hangs through Dec. 30 at
the Art Association's Artspace Main
Gallery. The artists will give a talk
at noon Friday and attend the show's
opening reception at 5:30 p.m.
The show takes its title from a line
in Shakespeare's "Macbeth": "Life's but
a walking shadow, a poor player, that
struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more." The artists
were drawn to the image of trying to
defy life's ending through movement.
With physical passage in mind,
Allen marshaled a multitude of tiny
legs to march up the gallery walls -
as if climbing a mountain - and then
spiral back down to the ground.
The legs' route refl ects the artist's
experience. Before becoming a mother,
Allen sculpted with such intensity
she could never fi nish a piece fast
enough. Now, with two young children
at home, she must work within
the pauses of parenthood.
"My art fl ows between their movements
and needs," she said.
The seemingly monotonous act of
casting the legs becomes momentous
when repeated some 365 times. Her
process mirrors her installation's design
of hikers plodding up a mountain,
steady, determined, each step
- and sculpture - becoming a measurement
of time.
"Three hundred sixty-fi ve legs later,
I have my mountain," she said.
Also within the gallery, Allen suspended
steel dress forms, sculptures
that evoke the body without encasing
it and that stand as metaphor for the
tensions surrounding female self-perception.
The silhouettes are delicate
and seductive but also resemble armor
or cages, suggesting fashion can be
both enhancement and confi nement.
The legs and dresses, both recurring
images in her work, began as experimentations
with removing sculpture
from its pedestal, of mulling the
fi gure without fully rendering it. Allen
saved appendages that broke off
from fi gures in the kiln and began using
them on their own.
"I wanted to lose the pedestal and
let my pieces become a little more
ephemeral and poetic," she said. "The
armor-like dresses become rather
ghostly and conveyed the spirit without
the skin."
Allen's installations wend their
way around the abstract paintings of
Rasmusson. Both represented by the
same Salt Lake City gallery, the two
artists forged a friendship by trading
artworks.
When they fi rst started sketching
the show, Rasmusson set out to explore
fi gures literally walking through
time. But as she began working, she
found herself fascinated by the creation
of memories - how we keep moments
in time - an exploration that
seemed more suited to abstraction.
Mirroring the mind, Rasmusson
built overlapping memories, each
layer shaped by the one before.
"Each layer has its own story, but
without each layer, the story is not
the same," she said.
Rasmusson creates her palimpsest
from plaster, acrylic and oil paints.
She approaches each painting as
an exchange of ideas.
"Painting to me is more conversation,"
she said.
Starting with an idea of what she
wants to say, her paintings grow from
the back and forth.
"You never know what it is going
to end up being in the end," she said.
"Each thought seems to create another
thought."
Rasmusson worked on all 10 paintings
at once, allowing them to talk to
each other.
"They have little bits of pieces that
are from each other," she said. "They
seem to solve each other's problems
that way."
Her conversations include ideas inspired
by Allen's art.
"I like the idea of her thoughts and
my thoughts coming together," Rasmusson
said.
Painter, sculptor converse about time, body
Work with artists
This week, Jen Harmon Allen and Jennifer
Rasmusson lead workshops at the
Art Association. Allen's sculpture session
has already begun, but space remains in
Rasmusson's "Mixed Media in Plaster and
Oil Paint" from Saturday to Sunday. In the
course, she will help artists explore and
experiment, working with wood panels,
plaster and other mixed media techniques.
Jennifer Rasmusson explores the physical experience of time through layers of plaster and paint. As with the way
memories overlap in the mind, each layer in her paintings informs the next.
Through the absence of the fi gure, Jen Harmon Allen meditates on the various
metaphors of her armor-like steel dress forms.