What's Written in What Stars
Were one to pass too quickly through Rebecca Seeman's solo installation project Stellar Attraction (on view at the Art Academy of Cincinnati's Pearlman Gallery from January 16-February 13, 2009), one risks drawing conclusions about the works presented that are but half-truths and cursory readings. Objects made from steel, aluminum, black rubber, and drawings in white ink on black paper do not reveal their full nature quickly. The artist dared discretion in their making, without relying on strong color, monumental scale, or trendy recognizable content to convince the viewer to continue communing with the installation. Perhaps that is one of the most important lessons drawn from these works: the experiences of these sculptural forms are not static like one might presume, but, as critic and poet Wayne Koestenbaum has said on the topic, if you continue looking, "things will start to happen." Rebecca Seeman has produced a quiet exhibition, the result of which might call for more hushed awe within the contemporary landscape.
Copious amounts of the blank gallery walls have been left as breathing room around an impressive number of diminutive objects hung high above one's head and low enough to nearly touch the baseboards of the space. How one progresses through the space is less linear than exhibitions where work is hung consistently at a natural viewing height or displayed on pedestals. In their arrangement and in the treatment of the surfaces of the different works, Seeman interplays the order of the grid against the unpredictable compositions of constellations.
Most of the works in the exhibition are perforated with different types of holes and marks. Spot lit, the walls behind the objects are haloed subtly with patches of starry skies. A good part of the experience of each object is immaterial, and I feel sorry for the rushed viewer who might not have lingered enough to appreciate these shadows and pinpoints of light transmitted by objects all around the room. The effect is like dusk, when the night sky reveals itself gradually, and the white of the gallery wall is slowly overtaken by stars and shades of blackness as the viewer's gaze nears each metal or rubber form. The dazzling reflections thrown off of the fronts of these works contrast the light patterning on the walls in a way reminiscent of Lucio Fontana's odes to Venice, where tall sheets of copper were gauged and torn, then hung in dark blue rooms and lit so that flashes of light were cast across the floors and ceilings before the pieces. For Fontana, the famous punched holes in his work beginning in the late 1940s were access points to what he called 'free space,' where the shallow space between the opened surface of a work and the wall behind it was imbued with a conceptual understanding of space that fused his understanding of the sciences with art's means for the soul to confess itself. Likewise, the conceptual space that Seeman here creates, hung with perforated discs, cones, and folded shapes, are not simply astronomical reverie, but make a work of finding personal meaning in the formal qualities of galaxies, not unlike those who originally named the constellations.
The most expansive installation is The Strainer, 2008, an array of bent, hole-punched metal forms arranged in the shape of a large triangle pointing downward. A symbolically feminine configuration, Seeman never slips into the overtly gendered, maintaining a position of formal purity that is only occasionally augmented with bits of commentary. Many of the patterns of holes in these metal forms were discovered on sieves and other cooking instruments. One crinkled disc retains the embossed brand 'The Pampered Chef' on it; another has a German brand name for cookery along its surface. Suddenly, from out of the overall geometry put forth in the exhibition, the reuse of a homemaker's tools remarks slightly on the universal (even cosmic) qualities of work, creation, and adaptation.
The stunner of the exhibition is hung low on the wall in the back space of the gallery. Southern Hemisphere, 2008 is a striking crowd of silvery dart-shaped pieces and their shadows, whose irregular edges curl with a surprising softness almost life gray feathers. The placement invited the viewer to move closer, perhaps crouching or (in my case, even kneeling, as if in reverence) in order to accommodate a better conversation with the parts of this work. The artist explained that the inspirations for the shapes in this piece were Peruvian metal garment pins called tupus, that, when made of silver metals, is associated with feminine moon worship. I daresay such sacred origins are easily intuited from the sculpture we are faced with.
Nearly all of the works are attached to the walls of the gallery space, save for a set of six small sheets of steel set on clear plastic bases so that they appear to hover. Their corners have been hammered to gently curve upward so that it feels as if they contain and command the air and space above them. A different constellation is inscribed into each of them so that lights from above cast a series of star patterns onto the plinth beneath them. Among them, the piece titled Sculptor utilizes a cosmic archetype to implement the artist's own identity into the skyscapes she has manufactured.
These works are handmade things, small testimonies to the creative process' ability to re-imagine how a thing might function. Throughout the exhibition, Seeman has reconfigured the function of tools and materials, as well as cultural and astronomical content into new experiences that are difficult to name and surprising in their deft control over their own beauty and strength.
