Paradigm shift
New Mexico painter with no aesthetic brakes is on a roll
New Mexico painter Molly Geissman is in pursuit of the holy grail of paradigm shift in her “Hoarded Spaces FT” solo exhibition at the Mariposa Gallery in Nob Hill.
Now I do know some people who will walk away from any conversation at the first mention of “paradigm shift,” but wait — there’s more. Geissman is concerned about the amount of mental baggage we carry around made up of old and often moldy notions about what is and what isn’t a necessity for a fully realized life.
In her artist’s statement, Geissman uses the analogy of her father’s basement that was a catchall for a mountain of mysterious boxes brimming with mostly useless stuff to describe how we cram our minds and cloud our thinking with hidebound truths that may in fact not be true at all.
Her description of her dad’s debrisladen subterranean vault triggered her inner-child imagination that informed her that the hoarded debris field was much more vast that what her young eyes perceived. In imaginary-fact, the daddy built piles of detritus spread into the great beyond, moving toward the magical realm of storybooks and rainy-night dreams.
Those dream-soaked rainy nights led Geissman to an impasse. She had to learn to either think or swim, to paraphrase Buckminster Fuller. So Geissman became an artist who began as a fabric and clothing designer and evolved about 20 years ago, into painting.
Her development of painting subjects sped through the human figure, organic floral motifs, geological layering and into a visceral and visual critique of 20th century prison architecture.
Obviously, her aesthetic brake pedal was never engaged, because Geissman now has arrived at the front door of the rag and bone shop of the human heart where she startled the cat with fancy feet, to paraphrase Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
In “Hoarded Spaces #1” which includes collage elements, Geissman builds architectonic space with a few lines that house emotional and intellectual debris within a surrealistic world of imagined values and rigid ly held beliefs. Her counter sensibility resides in a nocturnal state of mind racked with unseen fears, unfilled needs and abhorrence of even hints of change or progress.
When viewing her work, one could say “Cy Twombly” without too much fear of contradiction, but Geissman is far deeper than a quick dismissal. If analogies are needed, Alberto Giacometti’s “Palace at 4 a.m.” of 1932 comes a lot closer. Giacometti was a pioneering surrealist and a metaphysical artist who dwelled in a culture of dreamers.
Though all artists create selfportraits, Geissman is transcending her personal baggage and whatever it may include to mirror the retrograde and reactionary times in which we live. In “Hoarded Spaces #2,” Geissman offers a glimmer of hope with a profusion of fog gray that dispels most of the darkness, falling just a tone or two short of diurnal dawn.
While moving down the wall, viewers transit a cycle that indicates an awakening of sorts expressed in deep reds, pale ochers and creams that fill the composition in “Hoarding Spaces #6,” a richly painted rendering that includes a pyramid
atop a cube. One wonders whether Geissman is reaching back toward buried Pharaohs or contemporary falsehoods. How many of us can really think outside the box these days?
Geissman’s statement about the show concludes, “I relate this unforgettable memory (of her father’s crowded cellar) to the holding on of ancient ideologies with no basis in fact that hoard the space in all too many minds.”
Gee, I don’t know, can’t we all just get along? Rodney King aside, this is a luscious exhibition by a skilled artist who may never stop to smell the Rosicrucians along the way, but Geissman will surely always be asking, what’s next? I’m pretty sure her canvas-hauling station wagon came fully equipped with a paradigm shift and no aesthetic brakes, so look out kids; she’s on a roll.