2 artists explore where stuff meets self
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
What is the purpose of wooden desk drawer?
This is one of many questions that Diane Keane and Valerie Herrero pose in “Journeys Collected and Contained,” a new exhibit that runs through Aug. 3 at the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination at 5006 Penn Ave., Garfield.
The artists’ works are dissimilar. Ms. Keane, who draws substantially from her Catholic background, delights in miniature — strange little ecosystems of wax, trinkets and mystery enclosed in small boxes. Ms. Herrero’s art sprawls, with hanging wire and interactive features and outstretched branches.
What draws their art together is an interest in assemblage, in stuff gathered and kept, in attempts at imposing order, in teasing the orthodoxy of boxes and furniture.
“When you put something in a box, you’re trying to make sense of that,” Ms. Herrero said.
Her most striking pieces attempt to make sense of personal, embodied experiences: “152 Liminal Days as an Imaginal Cell” consists of a large armoire with tree branches reaching out of it. Its spindly arms bear cocoons made of the artist’s own shredded clothing, dirtied during a five-month period when Ms. Herrero only permitted herself to wear white.
“I did not sleep for a long time. I couldn’t calm down,” she said of the months leading to the white clothes experiment. “The white period came with a set of rules. The first was wearing white, the others were learning to sleep and say no to things.”
On the exhibit’s opening night July 6, viewers were encouraged to write about their own transformations on slips of paper, then enclose a the messages in cocoons to hang on the branches. This invitation to participate highlights some of the key provocations in Ms. Herrero’s art: What belongs to the artist and what belongs to the community? What happens when we destroy our clothing and keep it? What happens when we poke around another person’s wardrobe?
While Ms. Herrero’s work relies on intimacy, Ms. Keane’s work operates at a distance, culling lofty canonical images from Shakespeare, the Bible and found objects once owned by strangers into small assemblage boxes. Ms. Keane’s work simulates the dark confines of a confessional, the rapturous burning of a hundred votive candles, and the kitschy reverence of a china cabinet, all at once. With rusty metal pieces, vintage patterned paper and other tchotchkes, her art simulates age-old ideas of enclosure and preservation.
“Found objects are the heart and soul of assemblage,” Ms. Keane said of the flea market finds that inspire her. “A vintage item, it has history, it has ghosts.”
The most eye-catching of Ms. Keane’s pieces feature crosses, reprinted religious icons and eerie, disembodied hands. But the most provocative and moving pieces examine women in captivity.
“Blue Ophelia” features an illustration of Hamlet’s tragic love interest, obscured by a thick web of indigo thread. “Terem,” a reference to the female quarters in which Russian noblewomen were secluded from the mid-16th to early 18th century, features opulent velvet, a weighty padlock and dainty eyes in rusty metal peepholes. In both pieces, the figures are trapped behind glass, and it seems there is no way to free them.
From Ms. Herrero’s armoire to Ms. Keane’s miniatures, the exhibit poses many hard questions about gender.
One of Ms. Herrero’s works features samples of her hair that her friends snipped from her head. (She now sports a head of unevenly cropped hair.) Each of her friends wrote down the date, time and location of the haircut, along with a listing of something they would like to release. The tiny slips of paper “tag” each strand of hair, turning them into glass-cased specimens for the examination of a viewer.
Maybe assemblage art is the ideal medium for interrogating womanhood. Here, it asks what are women allowed to keep, and what they haveto give away.