ART REVIEW:
On view at the Brand Library Art Galleries is “Mixed Media Lost & Found,” featuring works by four female artists, Deborah Baca, Jane Brucker, Ursula Kammer-Fox and Leslie Sutcliffe, which politely blend together. They are similar in color, muted natural tones, and seem implicitly feminine in their sensibility.
Because of the nature of objects that have had a primary function, (encyclopedia pages, sprinkler heads, passport photos or hairpins,) a new role as art material implies a loss: the object’s prior identity. In addition, all of the works deal with concepts of failure, misinterpretation, uselessness and death.
Brucker’s “Memorial Projects” are large grids, made of found clothing and bedding. These garments are wrapped around frames, making a rectangle much like a stretched canvas. Certain details like buttons, labels, or seams interrupt the surface. In “Lost,” Brucker has taken to casting tiny female ephemera, such as a bit of lace, an eye shadow compact, thread spools and butterflies in bronze.
Brucker’s work is plagued by contradiction. While trying to breathe life into memorial objects, they are placed in the mausoleum of an art gallery. By merely presenting old things, a memorial is not made. Furthermore, in the process of metal casting, however, original objects are obliterated: The plastic or fiber forms burn away as molten bronze replaces them in a mold.
Sutcliffe’s work is varied in theme and form. Some paintings are screen-printed, some oil paintings mimic the lines of index cards or ruled note pads, and some display appropriated poetry on handmade paper. The images aim to link disparate pictures and words plucked from varied source material such as illuminated manuscripts and Internet search engines.
Sutcliffe’s aim is to focus on that which may fall through the cracks. Instead, her meandering thesis takes us on a tour of too many archaeological and anthropological interests and a variety of mediums, both archaic and contemporary. A collection without order or logic is simply a pile.
Baca’s works are also crafted in three styles. Her collaged drawings “fictionalize” found photographs through tidbits of type-written, often first-person narrative. Another piece reads, “Tilly and Linda shared a passion for African Violets, but they always hated each other.” Baca also makes functional assemblage lamps and large watercolors in homage to artists such as Julian Scnhabel.
Baca’s large watercolors are well-crafted and have an original stylistic quality. If these drawings weren’t honoring a painter who violently tacks broken dishes to his paintings, I wouldn’t question the motive of dedication in her practice, which seems to pride itself on its fictionalized sentiment.
Kammer-Fox makes sculptures out of things like dolls, clocks, a rusted tin can and a cheese grater. These form humanoid amalgamations of formerly used parts. Kammer-Fox insinuates these “Play Mates” are an escape from a well-educated sense of aesthetics. They are.
The most interesting piece I saw of Kammer-Fox’s was two pulleys set on top of one another, which looked vaguely like a duck. It was understated. Other works reminded me of the roadside advertisement of a tin man from the “Wizard of Oz,” made of mufflers.
The exhibition was not intentionally curated as an all-woman show. It seemed that these artists’ works were running on parallel tracks to Alyssa Resnick, library supervisor and Cathy Billings, librarian and gallery manager. Had this been presented as a female art show, I might have balked. It seems that the catalyst of these works is an unbridled and vintage sentimentality, which is all too often falsely relegated to the realm of the feminine.
JESS MINCKLEY is an artist, writer, art teacher and gallerist in Los Angeles. Minckley has a bachelor in fine arts from Otis College of Art and Design.