Three Solo Projects
With highlights from the permanent collection
Part of FiberPhiladelphia, 2008 International Fiber Biennial
March 7-30, 2008
Marie H. Elcin, Water, Water, Everywhere
Physick House Museum
Caroline Lathan-Stiefel, Keeping it Under Wraps
Phuong X. Pham, Stasis, Extended
Powel House Museum
Curated by Michelle Wilson and Robert Wuilfe
Humble materials and processes are the order of the day in much of contemporary art. A day’s visit to the New York artworld confirms this current preoccupation. From the New Museum’s exhibition Unmonumental, to the just-opened Whitney Biennial, one encounters the work of artists who forego expensive processes. They choose instead to work with materials that are sometimes prosaic, and often simply discarded scraps plucked from the street. Some of today’s most interesting artists, such as Phoebe Washburn, have become inspired masters of re-assembling the detritus of society.
The use of humble materials can get repetitive and unoriginal though, if their use and display is overly restricted to artists who take a deliberately ‘careless’ approach to technique and craftsmanship. Just like getting your disheveled hipster outfit wrong, it’s embarrassing to show up at the party with an artwork you put too much work into. The thing is: any strategy, repeated endlessly by an ever-growing number of people, simply becomes trendy. The choice between material culture and conceptual purity does not have to be all-or-nothing.
Marie Elçin, Caroline Lathan-Stiefel and Phuong X. Pham all use humble materials—things you might have in a drawer or closet at home. Yarn, horsehair, plastic bags and pipe cleaners comprise the types of materials utilized in this current offering by Landmarks Exhibitions: Contemporary Projects. These humble materials are transformed into lyrical and surprising site-specific installations at two of our historic house museums. Taking an approach to artistic production that uses simple objects, but aims for the opposite of studied carelessness, the artists have integrated their work into environments of precious collections and profound historical importance.
Marie Elçin: Water, Water Everywhere
Physick House
In Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, from which Elçin takes her title, a ship is lost in hot, equatorial seas. The crew spies an albatross, an agent of good luck. However, in a fit of rage, the sailor kills the albatross, causing the wind to die and stranding the ship on a “becalmed” tropical sea. The crew forces the sailor to wear this bird around his neck, marking him as their talisman of bad luck. As the rime progresses, the mariner travels through life and death to return to his homeland. Through this journey, he gains a reverence and a respect for all living things. This strange journey is incredibly poignant today – perhaps the earth itself is humanity’s albatross, and it hangs invisibly from our necks.
Elçin’s installation is a meditation on the history of urban disaster, and the interplay between humanity and the environment. During her research for this installation, Elçin did extensive research on the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, which killed approximately 5,000—the most ever to die in an American city in peacetime. Included in that loss was Samuel Powel. A major cause of the epidemic was the hot, humid summer that preceded it. This caused streams around the city to dry up, creating isolated puddles; excellent breeding grounds for the mosquitoes that carried the disease. In our present day, those streams have now been forced underground by the sprawl of the city. In light of recent disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, Elçin questions this rearrangment of nature. Her work makes us wonder if Philadelphia is prepared for a disaster caused by water. Her work is the beginning of a narrative, one that ends with a questionable future.
Caroline Lathan-Stiefel: Keeping It Under Wraps
Powel House
Lathan-Stiefel’s previous exhibitions have been in more traditional “white box” spaces. Keeping It Under Wraps is her first site-specific installation in an historic house museum. The intricately decorated spaces of the Powel House allow Lathan-Stiefel’s work to alternatively take on sinister, playful, effervescent and biological qualities. Lathan-Stiefel’s body of work naturally evokes a concern with materials and organic form, and she is influenced by a range of artistic traditions, from Southern handcrafted folk art, to the collage aesthetic of Kurt Schwitters. Every artist invited to develop a project for Landmarks creates new ways of viewing the spaces, collections or histories of the houses, and Lathan-Stiefel has directly engaged all three.
Lathan-Stiefel’s work makes use of materials most people dismiss – pipe cleaners, dry cleaning and plastic bags, yarn, and other discarded household objects. However, despite their humble origins, these materials are transformed. In Keeping It Under Wraps, these materials have been transformed into an exploration of the line between measured restraint and outright suppression in the emotional and physical lives of 18th century women. Lathan-Stiefel was struck deeply by a passage about women in a letter by Elizabeth Powel: “…their Imagination runs Riot; it requires the vigor of mind alone possessed by Men to digest & put in Force a Plan of any Magnitude.” In her installation, Lathan-Stiefel begins the process of releasing this internal “riot”—and achieves a balanced tension with the proper environment of the house. In this tension, the question is whether the riot is about to burst through to sprawl throughout the house, or whether the formality of the house will absorb and tame the riot.
Phuong X. Pham: Stasis, Extended
Powel House
Physically, Pham’s work for Powel House can be placed in a continuum that includes the “scatter art” of artists such as Karen Kilimnik (who presented a project at Powel in 2007), but takes a detour into a concern with deliberate process and materiality. Her work blends a mutative ritual – tying hundreds of knots of horsehair – with the randomness of scattered material. Her piece is almost ephemeral—barely touching the room through its physical presence—yet it forces viewer to take a prescribed path through the space. Pham gracefully combine material both coarse and fine. She aims to step beyond the memoir, to pull the reader into a distinct world, a distinct experience. In this new space, the ghosts of elegant 18th century dances intermingle with the hidden history of the horsehair factory the house became. An intimate image opens into multiple voices and simultaneously reveals tension and a complex richness.
At the turn of the twentieth century, prior to its restoration, the Powel House was a horsehair mattress factory. Pham’s work chooses to address this un-romantic period of the House’s history, and implies the potential of transformation into beauty. She addresses the nature of preservation itself – as something that is continually ongoing and adapting to a shifting world. Indeed, the Powel House itself was slated for destruction in the 1930’s, and had it not been for the formation of the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks, it would be lost to us today. Pham’s work alludes to the potential of finding beauty in all that is neglected or overlooked.
-Michelle Wilson and Robert Wuilfe, Exhibition Curators
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Caroline Lathan-Stiefel
