Eleven local artists explore, repurpose and generate new associations with the concept of line at the Kirkland Art Center’s newest exhibition, “The Three-Dimensional Line: Volume, Scale, Illusion, Emotion.”
Ellen Ziegler, curator of the show, said she found inspiration in the late minimalist sculptor Fred Sandback and his desire “to make sculpture that didn’t have an inside.” Ziegler spoke during the exhibition’s opening on Friday.
While some artists chose to adhere to Sandback’s work, others brought more abstract thought to the representation of line.
Michael Ottersen’s “Skinny Ocean” is a set of wooden slabs saturated in various colors of glitter. In his work, line follows form – but more specifically, the form of stripped-down magic wands.
Ottersen, who is a newcomer to the use of color, loves all the associations that come with the use of glitter. “Glamour, Vegas, drag queen – it’s all good,” says Otterson.
Margie Livingston also takes a more literal approach to line by creating various sculptures from cutout acrylic layers.
Timothy Brown’s “Corner Drawing” uses elastic to define a single rectangle extending from floor to ceiling, to create the illusion of a corner within a corner. His trompe l’oeil piece is the closest representation of Sandback’s own work.
As deceptively easy as Brown’s corner-within-a-corner may look, Ziegler assures it wasn’t: “I had to follow two pages, single-space, of instructions to install it,” she said.
Sandback’s influences are also visible in the gelatin prints and sculptures of Victoria Haven, in which she employs shadow to provide new dimension to the pins and rubber bands she positions into intricate geometric shapes.
Other artists find more abstraction within the line.
Jean Lullie sees line as a timeline. In “Lineage,” she layers a collection of film positives that span through 100 years of history. The viewer contrasts the nuances that follow a family’s genealogy in a light box.
Diem Chau’s “In Between” also explores abstraction. Similarly to female spies of World War II who communicated by passing encrypted messages in their knitting, she uses Morse code to embed excerpts of her father’s diary in red bands of strings. Each knot then represents a dot and a slipknot typesets a dash.
“It gives me chills,” said Ziegler when introducing Chau’s work.
Donna Schill, former adjunct professor with the University of Washington School of Art and a longtime supporter of the KAC, said that “Fascia” – Amy Hamblin’s towering organic sculpture – best reflects the exhibition’s theme. “She took line, wire and turned it into form that hardly takes up space,” said Schill.
This reflects another notion of Sandback: “Play(ing) with something both existing and not existing at the same time.”
Vija Celmins contributes the smallest, but equally impressive work in the exhibit. In “Untitled” she forms a starry sky via the exclusion or inclusion of graphite hatched lines.
The upstairs floor of the gallery reserves works that represent line as emotion or passage in a slightly serio-comedic way.
Sean M. Johnson’s “Tension at the Dinner Table” is rife with emotion and even elicited nervous laughter from viewers.
“I’ve been to a table like that before,” said one of the people passing by Johnson’s artwork.
His piece consists of heavy wood furniture supported by a complex system of strings held taut by nails. The sheer tension of strings and placement of nails provide a sense of stress to the conversation happening within these two interactions.
Robert Campbell’s multimedia installation is another profound piece and, as one member of the audience described it, resembles something straight from the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
“X, Y” is Campbell’s way of writing love letters to chromosomes apologizing for pollution and a plethora of other man-made carcinogens that are making them disappear. Campbell, who has been addressing this environmental impact since 1996, projects the letters from a translucent dome that uses light, sound and color.
The spider web, as 7-year-old Merek Weed calls Susan Zoccola’s “Neural Plexus,” is really a video installation that uses wire, plaster and gauze to fashion sculptural neural forms while a video plays in the background. Zoccola’s way of obstructing the video with the tangled synapses and dendrites reflect what may be going on inside our brains.
But for the little art enthusiast it still conjured up images of a rat’s nest.
“The Three-Dimensional Line: Volume, Scale, Illusion, Emotion” will be shown through May 28 at the KAC. For more information regarding this exhibition visit: www.kirklandartscenter.org
Mario De La Rosa is a student in the University of Washington Department of Communication News Laboratory.
