Current Installations
"Circles, Squiggles, and Lines”
“Circles, Squiggles, and Lines,” which is contemporaneous with Thanksgiving, Hannukah, St. Nicholas Day, Bodhi Day, Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, St. Lucia Day, Christmas, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa, Zarathosht Diso, New Years Eve, and Lailat Al Miraj, celebrates the generosity of the holiday season. On view are artworks by Susan Byrnes, Crystal Gregory, Theresa Hackett, and Mark Harris, whose extreme labor complements the handiwork involved in making holiday gifts for loved ones or the labor expended to fund gift purchases. Artists’ labor, and especially women’s work, has long been a theme in contemporary art, partly in response to minimal and conceptual artworks that appear comparatively effortless.
What sets “Circles, Squiggles, and Lines” apart from prior exhibitions focused on artists’ labor is that these three motifs evoke the bows, ribbons, string, and paper disguising some desirable holiday gift. Since we sometimes receive gifts that we dismiss as ridiculous, but later come to love, some philosophers compare art appreciation to gift reception. That is, we sometimes experience artworks that strike us as unremarkable, yet we end up thinking about them so much that we eventually come to admire them. In fact, those are the artworks we love the most, since we had to convince ourselves of their value. Once we get past our superficial experience with artworks, much like the packaging hiding our favorite gifts, we have a real treasure to behold. In their role as gift givers, artists put their artworks out there, having no clue how spectators will respond to their generosity.
With “Circles, Squiggles, and Lines,” however, the packaging is the gift. That is, the treasure is front and center, hardly hidden. What’s less visible, however, is each artist’s arduous labor. When one focuses on the artwork, one immediately notices the actions undertaken by each artist. One finds Susan Byrnes’ layers of hardened polyurethane, Crystal Gregory’s handwoven textiles cast in concrete, Theresa Hackett’s minute and monumental geometric motifs, and Mark Harris’ delicate paper cuttings, all inter- laced with layers of colorful materials. What’s more, one feels the energy expended by the artist, as if the calories burned while making the art were transferred onto the circles, squiggles and lines dazzling our eyes.
