Disappearances and Reappearances:
High Art Hiding in Plain Sight
Part 3 in the series 'Profundity in Public Art'
by Matt Morris
I've begun to notice that there are different echelons, different employs for art in public spaces throughout Cincinnati and its surrounding regions. Additionally, there are different, albeit overlapping audiences for these projects. Admirers of the immensely popular MuralWorks projects by ArtWorks may find Modernist works like the previously discussed George Rickey and Louise Nevelson sculptures in downtown detached or inaccessible. There are spaces almost entirely devoted to outdoor sculptures, such as the nearby Theodore M. Berry International Friendship Park or Pyramid Hill in Hamilton. I may be too ideal an audience for Friendship Park: the entire space feels designed to curve around and acknowledge the large works by David Nash, the Castle of Air by German architect Peter Haimerl and the tower sculpture by Susan Ewing and Vratislav Novak that designates the culminating endpoint of the park. The artwork and its situation are mutually considered, and a walk through the landscaped park to see the three major works functions as some alternative pilgrimage, with stations or shrines that didactically connect Cincinnati to a global community through text panels, inscriptions, and large, temple-like abstract works. The park is contrived to present clear access points to art; I find it resoundingly successful towards this goal.
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In Nest, supple, light-toned cloth punctuated by navy blue thread form this fittingly entitled sculpture. Cradled within its center is a photo of the face of a young man. Without learning anything of the artist, Susan Carlson, it remains for the viewer a tender, naive image of love. The photo, though, is of the artist's late 19 yr-old son. The childlike image of love remains as such, but gains poignancy and meaning. Precisely its childlike quality renders it devastating in this context. Touching narratives arise for the beholder; for example, the nest could symbolically represent the mother's rebirth of her child — once in flesh, now in spirit — back to the Universe. For a bird makes a nest to lay an egg and sit upon it. That natural process of preparation and nurture is here replaced with this small sculpture, within which there is only a photo preserving his visage, a contemporary form of the traditional death mask. It represents a dual loss: the loss of her child and the loss of her role as a mother — the proverbial 'empty nest.' This is the emblematic work of the Carlson's exhibition 'I Can't Imagine: Artwork from the Terrain of Grief' on display at the YWCA Women's Art Gallery in downtown Cincinnati.
