Mail Today, 13 May 2011, by Archana
Hindustan Times, 30 April 2011
Raveling Texts
Opening May 5 at 5:00 pm
American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg
On display through May 27, M-S, 11-6 pm
These works serve as texts, or visual records. They invite reading, or following the unraveling thread of an idea. Fittingly, the verb "to ravel" can mean its own opposite, "to unravel." It can mean both to entangle and disentangle, to complicate and simplify. These works acknowledge an admiration of traditional craft processes, but also a desire to challenge them. The artists, as outsiders to the craft heritage, strive to disassemble traditional forms and processes. Yet the contradictory meanings of raveling suggest that taking something apart also creates something new.
The threads in McCarthy’s weaving lead viewers to coffee and potato chip bags running horizontally through the weft where they might expect to find natural fiber. But what occurs naturally in her environment, what might be considered trash, she uses to create a textile with a unique cultural backdrop – her own. Raised in urban African cities, McCarthy has found an axis between developing and developed worlds, between the natural and synthetic, the traditional and contemporary - expressing a raveled cultural background. Her other works tell a similar story, as when she stitches and combines art materials with items found in an alley or appropriated from a gifted chocolate box. In the same way that text tells a story, textiles exist as records of human creativity, mythology, history, even identity.
The bygone craft of film animation and the age-old tradition of calligraphy inform Smith-Llera’s work. While making animated shorts in the twilight years of 16mm film, she witnessed her drawing sequences set in motion. Her current work explores how motion transforms a line, rendering it dynamic and even narrative. As in calligraphy, Smith-Llera uses line to capture motion on paper and in space through fiber sculpture. She unravels and ravels lines: through collage, printmaking and painting, she makes spontaneous, gestural drawings, takes them apart and reassembles them into a different order. Like a poem revolving around the spirit of a moment, these new lines tell a visual narrative by exploring snatches of captured motion. Smith-Llera’s work focuses on the act of leaping, where a body struggles upward, traveling weightless for a sublime moment before pounding to the ground. These works narrate this upward act as a passage from one state to another, bearing witness to the transformation.
For Gustafson, the creative process revolves around a raveling and unraveling of ideas, techniques, and accidental discoveries. A completed piece represents destruction, construction, and renewal. Although painting on canvas is traditionally 2-dimensional, Gustafson aims for 3-dimensionality by utilizing mixed media and the underlying surface texture provided by a recycled canvas. In doing so, she challenges herself with the task of re-creating a previous artistic attempt, with its unpredictable surface and color scheme, by "covering" the old and "uncovering" the new. She seeks the accidental surprises that result from layering, adding, and removing paint, paper, images, and texture. Intersecting, opposing, controlled, and chaotic lines/forms appear and disappear; they connect and inter-weave the painting’s exposed design, colors, and texture with what lies beneath. The paintings may be representational or abstract, but leave room for the viewer's own interpretation. The end result is an interconnected re-invention of the beginning.
