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| She Found Her Voice by Gail Crum from the exhibition Uncovered Stories |
If you are a member of the viewing public as opposed to being an artist, you may not know that one of the many beautiful things that art does is bring meaning to the times. Artists have a way of looking at the world differently than most people. That quirky way of seeing gets combined with the tools of expression, and the end result, the piece of art, is what you see when you visit an exhibition like my current one, Uncovered Stories.
In this three-woman exhibition, the fourth one presented by Gail Crum, Jill Milenski, and me in as many years, much of the work presented was made during the pandemic last year. Artworks, such as our trio of altered books made to keep us going and connected, reflect what was happening just as a contemporaneous journal written during the Civil War would. You just need to open your heart to connect to the artwork.
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| The artists created altered books, which they shared in a round robin during the pandemic, to stay connected with each other when they couldn't meet. |
Gail's piece, shown above, finds meaning in uncovering the beauty in a cast-off cloth doll, which she placed in a glass case she lined with delicate handmade paper. She recasts the broken-down figure, ennobling it with beauty and grace. Indeed, she found her voice.
In her piece, below, Jill combines drawing, painting and collage to create Doorways Into the Past, a piece that contemplates the joys and perils of raising a teenager during the pandemic. It's both fraught and wistful at the same time, and certainly something any parent can relate to.
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| Doorways Into the Past by Jill Milenski, as seen in Uncovered Stories. |
Jill has made nearly two dozen pieces in this series, exploring the rabbit hole of feelings, finding new expressions every time. This is another beautiful aspect of art, this time reserved for the maker of art. Yes, the viewer reaps the benefits of the rabbit hole journeys, but for the artist, long series such as this one, lead not only to deep personal meaning, they create breakthroughs in one's work that forge new paths and create new challenges. It's an exciting place to be.
One of my own series relates to home and houses. I started both drawing and constructing them as assemblages about five years ago, when we were working on an exhibition entitled Memories Evoked: Circling Back Home. In addition to teensy little oil pastel drawings of houses on top of boxes, I added sticks stitched in place. I even created one large piece from an old dresser drawer. Called Pink House, it was almost a 3-D diorama of my childhood home. I put legs from an old television on the bottom and an old rabbit ears antennae on the top. I love that piece, which I still have.
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| Traveler by Gayle Pritchard, as seen in Uncovered Stories. |
