Convergence

The Erie Art Museum inaugurated a brand new gallery Saturday March 1, and it is a beautiful addition.  The second floor above the Frame Shop is now a polished sunlit jewel box.  As the elevator doors opened on the inaugurating exhibit, Convergence, I was struck by a dazzling spectacle of color and light.  Convergence is a five-woman show:  Von Allen, Associate Professor at Brigham Young University; Virginia Scotchie, Associate Professor and Head of Ceramics at the University of South Carolina; Virginia Derryberry, Associate Professor of Art, Painting and Drawing, at the University of North Carolina at Asheville; Alison Helm, Professor of Art at West Virginia University; and Reni Gower, Associate Professor in the Department of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. 

The show itself is arresting as a grouping, and is infused with the exhilarating ambiance of the contagious value radiating from the container to what it contains.  The individual works, once isolated from the exhibit and focused on, reveal a common aesthetic impulse.  To open the show, Von Allen, sculptor and former Erie resident, gave a fine lecture and slide presentation of her work and that of her students.  She said she chose the artwork represented in Convergence (small ceramic objects: enlarged versions of bracelet charms) because she didn't want anything to get broken in transit, which is too bad because the bulk of her work is exhilaratingly energetic and the work she elicits from her BYU students is first rate.  Allen is one of those rare commodities: an artist who is also a genuinely inspiring teacher. 

            Virginia Scotchie's ceramics are abstract kitchen appliance orbs and rings in which I tried to find faces (some other viewers, women, made Viagra jokes).  Her 'Pink Knob Bowl' is somewhat emblematic of a domestic element that winds through, but does not entirely pervade, this show.  Reni Gower builds dazzling altars out of cloth and paint that both evoke and defy an ecclesiastical interpretation.  Virginia Derryberry paints pictures of burning barns that are eye-catching and, oddly, both alarming and beautiful.

            Alison Helm's complex assemblages of metal, glass, and ceramic are aggressively non-metaphoric, non-symbolic, exuberantly polished, and unapologetically decorative.  Convergence owes much to the ornamental, and is unabashed about that.

So it was odd to read the wall-mounted copy.  As if to both counter and embrace the estrogeneity of the exhibit, Virginia Spivey, Assistant Professor of Art at University of North Carolina at Asheville, writes: "Convergence brings together . . . women . . . working in different media and finding different methods to express their individual concerns and artistic interests.  Yet 'convergence' suggests a point of common ground, a coming together arrived at from varied and distinct directions.  While this exhibit highlights the diversity of those separate paths, it ultimately demonstrates the profound connection revealed in their union: a collective awareness and understanding about life developed through experience that remains truly unique."  This, we knew already.

            Spivey says that this art expresses a 'shared interest in the uncontrollable forces that shape human existence and, more particularly, inform the lives of women.'  These uncontrollable forces include 'natural energies,' 'cycles of life,' and 'personal needs for spiritual and emotional fulfillment and the pervasive social and cultural pressures that affect us every day.'  Further, these five artists "seek balance through their acknowledgement and independent struggle with these conditions that characterize contemporary life.  Through the creative process they find resolution and a formal language that can communicate understanding to others."  It's like she's saying, "This stuff is art."

            Elsewhere we read that Helm's steel assemblages "address issues of beauty" while "she transfers interpretation into a spiritual context."  Scotchie's ceramic phallus/masks "provide a functionality more emotional and psychological than usable" (in other words, they might make you feel good, but you can't make a souffle in one?) but her "surface treatment juxtaposes contradictory illusions of rust . . .  and parched earth with the smooth polished surfaces of machine metal or glass," and thereby "suggest balance and a sense of unique perfection."

Gower’s clerical shrines, "create a sense of beauty" that "transcend their own initial jarring juxtaposition as they offer a visual respite as an alternative to our fragmented world."  Derryberry's burning buildings “examine natural disasters” and “convey nature’s redemptive ability to restore and purify,"  and Allen’s Charm Series "reference the raked, charred, and scarred surfaces of earth and flesh," but “her work conveys a powerful metaphor of triumph through toil." 

I must admit that at this point I was starting to grin.  Spivey's copy seemed to be reducing this interesting show to ArtSpeak in an Age of Therapy.  Convergence is contemporary women’s art, but it is also contemporary academic art, so Spivey explains and defends what needs neither explanation nor defense.  She sounds as if she's saying, "No, this isn't a bunch of pretty, meaningless trinkets; it's a confrontation with contemporary society's nameless forces."  Spivey comes off as nervous and protective of female artists who desire to make beautiful objects, and her commentary is a dangerous distraction from an otherwise valuable exhibit. 

But I couldn't quit reading.  In Spivey's Artspeak, academic artists do not make things, they "explore issues of" or they "reference."  Artists "deal with themes of transition," "explore life events with a spiritual slant," "explore society's complexity," "explore the themes of personal narrative and transition," "explore emotional and psychological themes," and (here we go) "border elements of decorative arts with technological symbols such as binary code."  Her explanations read as if they are statements about postmodern art's anxiety. 

But we can leave the text and enjoy the show.  The Erie Art Museum's new gallery, the product of much hard work by an inspiring staff, will house many more fine exhibits, and as the inaugural rabbit to pull out of the endlessly refilling hat of contemporary academic art, it works very well.  I'm anxious to see what's next.