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What I experienced first was colour: gorgeous, bright, strong, optimistic, brash. Cadmium yellow deep, raspberry candy-floss, the palest of pale red, the ambiguity of white on white. And then shape: conch, whorl, target, and that large round ball of coils. And finally texture as I extended my hand outward to touch: silky, delicate, and then rubbery, malleable, and clammy.
Entering inside Glorious, the ceiling-suspended-sun-blazing and light-filled conch made of strand upon strand of wound and threaded colour, I felt cocooned and quiet, too, and remembered the story of Penelope, Odysseus' wife, who each night would unravel all she'd woven that day, completing nothing, and protecting herself, thereby, from the greedy mob of suitors ... "when it's finished, then I'll pick my new husband"... chaste and in control of the family fortune until her warrior might return ... such discipline and resolve, such economic shrewdness.
In conversation with Mariela, I learned, though, that she's no Penelope, because it's not a political statement of any kind she's making. But what is her intent with these pieces in the installation here at ace
artinc.? What is it
she's doing?
It's very clear she's interested in materiality and in the transformation into art of materials used primarily in industry or in children's craft. (In my recollection, this installation is one of only a few in aceartinc.'s recent history that has focused so intensely on materials and where "concept" or "idea" follows behind). At the front of the gallery is the huge, stunningly coloured hair-like sculpture Glorious, womb-like and made entirely of bright pumpkin coloured thread, skeins and skeins and skeins of it twisted and slung into shape - and again I think of a myth, but this time of Rapunzel and her long hair let down from the tower window. Towards the back of the gallery is Undone, the coiled ball of pink plasticine, spilling out its entrails absurdly onto the floor into something that looks like melded leaves flattened onto the ground, or like a placenta of PeptoBismal gushing out but spilling only so far, or like some nightmare of bubblegum discard-ed onto the underside of the table. Who knows what miscarriage of nature this might be?
Mariela is serious about her materials, ordering boxes and boxes of Guetermann thread direct from the manufacturer's Montreal agent (Guetermann is one of the world's largest manufacturers of notions for the tailoring trade - threads, zippers, ribbons, etc), and importing all that yummy plasticine right from the manufacturer in Italy. Neither of these two large pieces is light in weight despite appearances. So there's a transformation right there.
Mariela made the point that the installed sculptures are different from what they were in her studio: She can't ship them fully configured. Once at aceartinc., she added additional coils to the pink ball of Undone in order to bring the ball back to its ideal roundness, for example, and then proceeded to fashion and manipulate the outspread pinkness. Glorious also was only partly formed when she arrived to install the show and she spent days hanging the remaining thread and coaxing it into just the right arrangement. She puts a Platonic spin on this necessary part of the installation process: for her, it's emblematic of the transformation and ordering of the chaos in the world by means of the creation of physical manifestations of her ideal sculptures.
And then there is the series of quiet, hardly visible gouache drawings of spiraling circles, done without any mechanical measuring device, all aiming for a perfection, each drawing completed at one sitting in an intense contemplative effort. They certainly don't have the immediate visual wallop of the two sculptures, and for me they're much less rich in interpretive possibilities, but they have a type of minimalist elegance. And they speak to Mariela's ideas about inside and outside, and about trying to control or keep at bay the madness of the outside world.
This work makes me think of a bravura performance by a concert pianist: learn the piece, have an idea of it in the mind, sit down, compose oneself, and start to play. Ignore any mistakes that are made, because, after all, in performance, one can't stop and say, "oops, sorry", and then start over. This allusion struck a chord of recognition with Mariela, seeming appropriate because she's also a musician, and she understood immediately how that attitude might apply to the pieces in this installation. Think of drawing all those circles and getting them as concentric as she did, and doing them at one sitting. Thatıs bravura.
In addition to working to transform materials into the unexpected, Mariela says she wants her work to resonate almost the way "sound and light do in the senses and body cavities", and to "speak of opposites: inside and outside, order and chaos". The circle drawings could be hypnotizing, pulling the viewer into them and inside the spaces between the lines. With Undone, I think the effect is more one of intellectual curiosity, perhaps some dread, but certainly of amusement and wit. But with Glorious, light pours in from the top; and through the mesh of golden thread, a slight reverberation and an echoing of sound is felt by the viewer because of the cocooning. With this piece, inside and outside merge.
Susan Turner is an artist working with digital images both in photography and video. Like Mariela, she is interested in issues of transformation, but explores them not through tactile materials but through digital manipulation. She has contributed essays to Critical Distance on two previous occasions.
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