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Somatic Scales by Sharon Steel
A flip through any couture fashion magazine will provide explicit evidence of how society views the body. Or, perhaps only how we are encouraged to perceive it, and what advertising, modern trends and scientific advances offer as proof of aesthetic beauty. Visiting curator Patricia Phillips and the five artists whose work encompass Somatic Scales, the latest exhibit at the Mills Gallery, are less concerned with the blatant conclusions we can cull from the pages of Vogue. They are interested in the hidden undertones of scale and body knowledge, a notion that, in the case of this show, has overlapped in each of the artists' efforts for some time.
"It's not about illustration of the idea, so much as it is about putting a lot of questions or queries out," says Phillips, an artist, author, and professor at SUNY New Paltz.
That much is certainly true of Somatic Scales. The investigations into the physical complexity of the body, and its relationship to scale and technology resulted in an assortment of pieces that fall well into the boundaries of the abstract.
"Somnium," a sculptural installation by Audrey Goldstein, is the best bridge between the conceptual and a tangible understanding of the exhibit. Described by Goldstein as a silent healing machine, "Somnium" resembles a cross between a plexi-glass bed and a romantically lit coffin. Seen inside the structure, underneath a thin silver mattress, are multi-colored circuits and wires along with a creased, cocoon-like tube. The circuits trace the vague outline of a person whose head, heart and intestines are both hooked up to and create Goldstein's machine. Here, Goldstein remarks in her artist's statement, "Insomnia, stress and nightmare are made transparent."
The coupling of the surreal with the grotesque emerges as one implied theme of Somatic Scales. Nancy Bowen's "Cerebral Flora" sits alone on a pedestal, a blown-glass flower that could be mistaken for a magnified chunk of brain matter. Blood red wires curl around the glass and steel, incorporating what the artist deems a "decorative impulse" into familiar elements of anatomy. "The pieces may speak of the contradictions of pleasure or pain, or beauty and horror, and are often mediated by humor which is sometimes perverse," Bowen writes. "Eruction," a mixed-media combination of glass, beads, and, not surprisingly, wood, accomplishes her mission quite deftly.
Skid marks never seemed so permanent as in "Road Art," a series of digital prints on transparency paper, made indelible with the addition of graphite and charcoal slashed directly onto the gallery wall. Inspired by several car accidents in rural Maine, Nancy Manter was struck by the fact that skid marks were the last traces left by a number of teenagers that lost their lives. Her link to the body is embedded in the landscape itself, and, says Phillips, "a physical memory or a muscle memory, serving as a genesis for her work."
Ann Messner contrasts traditional bronzed sculpture and new-media, MRI animation in her rather existential interpretation of the everyday experience. "I am immersed in an attempt to translate an unease, or perhaps distrust…my creative intention is a distillation of the chaos that is contemporary life or the contemporary experience," she states. "Beating Heart" and "Freefall," projected footage of a pounding heart and organs within a rotating figure can be viewed in two separate, closed off corners of the gallery. However, "Dunce" is out in the open, an odd sprawl of bronze-cast objects that include a megaphone, tree roots shaped into a heart and trailing veins, and a stool with a round hole hewn into its seat. Messner's focus is the heart, as she wonders about the condition of the human heart in relation to the cities, or fortresses, we have built.
"Size Matters: A Suite of Five," perhaps the most lucid artistic analysis within the exhibit, also traverses emotional territory. Randy Garber references the body in life-size oil and watercolor drawings of the female form on thin parchment. Repeating images of birds, piano scroll perforations and hands in various expressions of sign language shadow the bodies, but the garbled poems etched onto the panels lend a more defined air to Garber's paintings. "My heart all with you love/You love I/cause-Be/Lone-A/I Am," one reads.
Somatic Scales might be the kind of exhibit that keeps spectators wondering, leaving certain aspects unanswered, but perhaps the body and its eccentric wealth of functions are meant to remain abstract—except to those who can boast medical training. "I don't think these artists are looking so directly at the changing conventions of the body," says Phillips, who points to Somatic Scales as a complete collaboration with the artists. "I think they're all digging deeply, trying to look at more enduring issues."
Somatic Scales runs until Sunday, August 1, at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St., Boston, 617.426.8835. www.bcaonline.org. The Mills Gallery is open Wed-Thurs, 12-5pm; Fri-Sat, 12-10 pm; and Sun, 12-5pm.