Female artists find expressions of home in 'A Place of Her Own'

Women Artists Explore a Sense of Place
BY SURA WOOD

Women's Work

A Place of Her Own

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ARTWEEK | May 2009 | Maureen Davidson
‘Some Assembly Required’ at Mary Porter Session Art Gallery, UCSC

Clinging to the entrance wall of the Session Art Gallery is a torn and battered overnight case. Hunching down, one is afforded a view through a small window into its dimly lit interior where a lens imprecisely magnifies the scene inside: A pinned moth appears fuzzily in the foreground; the fine clock works behind is in sharp focus; the surrounding space is distorted such that a lining of antique wall paper takes on a tremulous presence. Kim Bookbinder’s Everything Was Going Great (2006) is a fitting introduction to Some Assembly Required: race gender and globalization at the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery at UC Santa Cruz. With this exhibition, curator Shelby Graham poses the idea that concepts of race and gender are complicated by globalization. To that end, Graham gathered thirteen artist s of diverse backgrounds and generation each know for the strong narrative content of their assembly work, to create an illuminating conversation on the topic. Boekbinder’s work requires viewers to stoop, and the exhibition demands a small contortion in one’s thinking in order to see all the works in the context of the ideas that inspire the show. But taken as a whole, the exhibition does brilliantly demonstrates the power of assemblage to tap the well of iconography wherefrom artists to tell tales.
Boekbinder’s suitcase story box dimly reveals a womblike interior, but in Thank You for Leaving (2005) the artist carves a deep swathe into a thick, uncovered book, exposing a rectangle of nails sprouting within; it is a work of fierce formal and psychological impact brisling with anger and defense. The late Gaza Bowen echoes the sentiment, but with characteristic irony, in Shoes for the Angry Little woman (1990), a cunning little pair of real stiletto heels is exalted on an embroidered miniature four-poster Monty Monty’s phallic Vintage Totem (2005) consists of antique cigar boxes, tins of tobacco and floor wax, instruction books, and other items stacked in a tonally cohesive, spatially balletic and impossibly tall formation. It could be the work of an obsessive arranger — or the aftermath of a college beer blast in a collectible shop.
Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Private Landscapes and Public Territories (1998) occupies a teeming armoire-trend-altar with a molting interior of faux-mossifed angels and saints, dented mementos and dog-eared photographed entwined with long-dried garlands, like a shrine to dusty and untended gods. Nearby, Maggie Yee echoes traditional Mexican imagery from the Mexican Day of the Dead in her shadowbox assembles of China’s similar traditions in the Ching Ming Triptych (2004). In her Bound to Fashion (2007) yee refers to the Chinese practice of foot binding—and more modern mutilation. A photo of Marilyn Monroe looks on as a headless bejeweled doll is crammed into a box and wired in place.
Where Bowen, Mesa-Bains and Yee assemble objects that are inherently intriguing or fraught with powerful cultural mojo, Douglas McClellan thrusts humble objects—nails, paper takes, bingo cards wire—into unaccustomed staring roles within his theater of reuse, deploying the box as his proscenium in three works from the ’80’s 90’s. With formal unity and high craftsmanship wielded by droll humor, McClellan stimulates the impulse to metaphor.
That impulse evades Betye Saar’s Miss Hanna’s Secret (1975), a wooden jewel box strewn with dried rosebuds. The chamber of the box are sparely occupied with flyspecked tintypes, military buttons and faded scraps. Thought it originally inspired a hunt form meaning, now the form seems numb with overuse and there’s an impulse not to pray. Alas for the pioneers. There is no such shortage of stimulus engagement with Alison Saar’s A Spade Is Always a Spade (2002). The artists, daughter to Betye Saar, appropriates the rusted wedge of four shovels as the surface for dark oil portraits, each of a black man staring our from under the pointed arch of the shovels like a saint tin its gothic niche. The four spades are lined up against the gallery wall , as if ready for use.
Works by Mildred Howard wield historical reference with wry humor on the subject of race. Willie Little’s works from his In Mixed Company (2008) series spin cockleburs and cracker tins, a klan hood and a creation story into a works of rust and glitter, irony masking staunchness, as if an inside joke told on oneself.
Some Assembly Required wields the inherent power of assemblage to access cultural narratives triggered by the metaphoric use of objects. Creating an interaction of such works on subjects of race and gender, it exposes the erosion of some old forms of narrative, and poses questions about the validity of some longstanding cultural issues.

Some Assembly Required: race, gender and globalization closed April 18 at the Mary Porter Session Art Gallery , UC Santa Cruz. Other artists in the exhibition included Len Davis Elizabeth Dorbad and Adia Millett. The exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum from January 24 to May 9, 2010.

Los Angeles Times — Sights About Town — Art for Dinner
May 2, 1991 | Josef Woodard | Special to the Times | Ventura, CA.

Maggie Yee’s works at the Gallery Restaurant are conversation pieces, not just the usual pretty wall paper.

What you normally expect from art in restaurants is a harmless complement to the decor, nothing to upset the diner. What you get, refreshingly with the art of Maggie Yee—now up at the Gallery Restaurant in Venture’s Doubletree Hotel—is really suspended and amended. Instead of pretty, inoffensive wallpaper to go with the meal, you get nutty conversations pieces and a deliciously off-center aesthetics.

In this show sponsored by the Ventura Art Assn., Yee fashions her acrylic and mixed -media works after photographs, then lets her imagination run a bit wild. Leaning toward the surreal and the fantastic, Yee uses various means to distort images, create giddy juxtaposition and generally maintain a lightheaded and light-handed approach.

In an artist’s statement, Yee claims to seek the release of “dream souls.” Before you scream “California-ese, though, notice the satirical humor threading through the show. The space cadet in “Circumplanetary Dropout” could be any post-60’s existential drifter with a blissful grin and wreathed with psychedelic frills.

Figures have been splashed with decorative tinsel and swirls, Jackson Polllock-esque drips and multiple icons such as trails of trinkets. Little sea creatures, non-sacred cows and wine carafes float around a tilted image of a Charthouse Restaurant in “Pub Crawl at the Wonton Junction.” Tiny sweaters offer an ironic framing device in “Sweater Maker.” the center piece of which is a sheep’s face peering out benignly in ultra-close- up view.

“Men at Work” is the most peculiar of a peculiar lot. What appear to be five Indonesian dance hall gals sitting on parquet steps for a portrait, surrounded by decorative confetti, may be a drag ball. They’re bating in an aura of twisted festiveness, as are we, the viewers.

Though “Sprits of Fire Water” is not one of the stronger visual pieces on display, the title and the notion may reveal the essence of Yee’s art. There is something slightly tipsy about her take on art. If it all begins to seem normal, you may have ordered one too many.

Joe Cardella helped me see how wonderful it was to exchange art between other artists and feel connected.

Limited Edition Quarterly, published for 4 years in Honolulu.

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Collective Figure Drawings:
Under the influence of wine, chocolate & conversation

STUDIO Gallery was founded in 2003 to showcase the work of Bay Area artists.
This gallery is a collaboration of Rab Terry and Jennifer Farris.

Joyce Gordon Gallery is a commercial fine art gallery located in the downtown district of Oakland California.

AAWAA is a nonprofit arts organization based in San Francisco, founded in 1989.