With walls and windows as canvases, the artists featured in “Up Against the Wall,” the latest exhibit at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, utilize the space’s unique and sweeping architectural surfaces to support their work.
The pieces in “Up Against the Wall” come of out of the tradition of late 1960s and early 1970s conceptual art.
“The idea [behind a piece of artwork] is just as important as the execution,” said Nina Felshin.
Felshin, the gallery curator, realized that in order to have an exhibition reliant on the space of the gallery, there needed to be plenty of time for creation and installation. The summer turned out to be the perfect time for that. The six artists featured in “Up Against the Wall” came to Wesleyan as early as June and as late as August and worked tireless, consecutive hours to complete their works. The artists who stayed overnight were housed at the Center for the Humanities.
“This is not a typical white cube space,” said Felshin, “It seems crazy not to utilize this amazing space.”
Mary Lum’s untitled acrylic wall painting was inspired by a collage she had made from cut-up comic book strips. With its incredible size, Lum required a scaffold to paint the work, and bright, cartoon-like colors. Lum fascinatingly discussed her piece in terms of the Looney Toons.
“I think of this like when the Road Runner gets to run through the mountain, and Wile E. Coyote gets smashed and sometimes falls flat, splattered to the ground,” Lum said. “Some people can enter into the space and some people can get stopped at the surface. It becomes an exercise in memory. What are you going to draw from to enter into the space? It reminds everyone of something different.”
Another artist who utilized the walls of the Zilkha for her work was Elana Herzog. Her untitled piece, a tattered cotton chenille bedspread with a campy peacock at its center, is stapled to the wall and, according to Felshin, conveys the dark side of domesticity with a kind of wink at the same time. The wall space proves integral to the work.
“The process I use basically destroys the bedspread,” said Herzog. “It becomes fused with the wall, almost like a tattoo that is embedded. It emerges from the wall and recedes into the wall at the same time. The surface of the wall is like the picture plane of the painting.”
Famed conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s piece, “Zug Mountains,” is a collaboration piece with Music Professor Alvin Lucier. LeWitt traded a wall drawing of his for a trombone and piano musical composition of Lucier’s inspired by a photograph of the Swiss and Austrian Alps as seen from Zug, Switzerland. While Lucier transcribed the mountain ranges into musical notation, LeWitt had a segment of the Alpine skyline drawn across a wall in the Zilkha Gallery with a black marker.
Students were then enlisted to complete the piece. With red, yellow, and blue markers, the students tried to imitate the original line segment in a pattern all the way down to the floor of the gallery. The imperfectly imitated pattern results in a vast work of seemingly merging and undulating lines set to the sliding of the trombone and the punctuated notes of the piano.
Shoshana Dentz and Zilkha Gallery Supervisor William McCarthy rely on the windows of the Zilkha for their works. Both created gouaches, a method of painting with opaque watercolor mixed with a preparation of gum, on glass. Dentz’s “Portal #10,” a swirling vortex of barbed wire that is number ten in a series of works entitled “Portal,” is, amazingly, her first-ever painting on glass.
Dentz painted in the negative space of the work, and while the obstacle of barbed wire conveys a sense of danger, the transparency of the image makes us appreciate the scenery through the window, leading us to something beautiful.
In “Remembered Light,” McCarthy depicts a series of small landscapes. The small-boxed gouaches represent the scenes through all of the windows in the gallery, including a small atrium. With the ambient light behind the small works creating depth, McCarthy also shows us the beauty of the landscape that can be seen through the Zilkha windows.
The shadow on a wall at the back of the gallery could easily be dismissed, but it is actually part of a fascinating piece by Mary Temple entitled “Corner Light Fragment with Hardwood Floor and Pink Walls.” By installing a small hardwood floor at the base of the wall and painting the wall with latex paint, Temple created a shadow of a serene scene in nature on the floor and wall. The fleeting moment when we think the painting is indeed a shadow is meant to inspire us to re-think other aspects of our own life. The depiction of the scene in nature is also of significance to Temple.
“I wanted this to be in a place where light never hit,” said Temple. “I want to fool you….One of the things I’m interested in is stilling a moment. We all have moments that we wish could last forever.”
Because these works of art are dependent on the surfaces of the Zilkha Gallery, they will be removed from the walls and scrubbed off of the windows after the exhibition closes. Come mid-October, these pieces will cease to exist. Be sure to catch the exhibit before these works of art are gone forever, for while they are beautiful to look at, these six pieces also inspire us to look and think beyond what is right in front of us.
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