Anne Doris-Eisner
“Fertilization,” black acrylic paint on paper,.
Everybody knows that a face can conceal far more than it reveals. But what if you asked artists to contribute a revelatory self-portrait — no physiognomies allowed?
That’s exactly the challenge artist and curator Marissa Rozanski put to her artist colleagues. The subsequent show emerged, she said, out of her peering at her own compositions and “wondering where it came from. What it says about me and my work, and the same for other artists.”
Rozanski with her own work, “Unscripted Lines,” paper lithograph and hard pencil.
The result: A novel and fascinating exhibition on the non-portrait portrait, on view as the latest show at the Arts Council’s Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery on Audubon Street.
More Than a Face has 23 modestly sized works by about half as many artists, in media ranging from monotypes to painting to sculpture, and there isn’t a face in the crowd. Or a hand or a leg or a cerebellum.
There is, however, Barbara Hocker’s spine. Hocker, a Hartford-based multimedia artist, said that an injury, 16 weeks of physical therapy, another injury, and more therapy prevented her from launching new projects. After all that, The Book About My Back, which happens to be the only sculpture in the show, just had to get made.
The vertebrae are charmingly rendered from paper. But the line of them follows a copper tube that Hocker modeled precisely to the curvature of her back. She’s also included a knot of copper between the fifth lumbar vertebrae and the sacrum, where a cyst developed, and a flourish of copper strands to illustrate the artist’s continuing sciatica.
Meanwhile, Janice Bielawa’s pen and ink drawing “Underneath It All” is illustrative of arguably half of the images in the show. You could be looking at trees, or circuitry, or blood vessels, or you name it.
Janice Bielawa
“Underneath It All,” ink on paper. Bielawa.
Bielawa said it more simply: “I’ve always thought about my trees as being me.” She had recently done some research on elm trees, but when she began the work, she followed no model. “I put the marks on paper and follow where the marks go.”
Bielawa elaborated: “It’s all the stuff you don’t see, what’s beneath the surface. Everyone ‘puts on a face,’ but underneath there’s a lot of stuff going on. When I do my art, it’s my feelings [coming through]. I don’t sit down to draw a tree.”
Anne Doris-Eisner, who has four works in the show, concurred. “I think this says more about who I am than any photo or painting of my face,” she said.
She too said she starts with random marks and follows their lead. “I spend a lot of time building, then carving” to add another dimension. There’s some tiny script lying on the stalks, or filaments, or curves of her “Fertilization.” Her aim is personal exploration, but the effect she wants to leave is of the mysterious and ambiguous.
Likewise, Irene Miller’s collage “Unleashed” derives from a specific trigger experience — going through a battery of ophthalmological tests. “This is definitely a self-portrait,” she said. “This is my brain on fire.”
She focuses her work on the materials she works with: the shapes, colors, and volumes, and especially the layers that comprise the collage.
“Life is made of layers. That’s what it’s all about,” she said.
Layers, yes, but also branches and interweavings and the organic forms of nature mirroring that of human bodily structure and experience. That’s Rozanski’s deep belief and likely why so many “branchings” are in her own work and the works she chose.
“There are a lot of natural formations, the way things move in nature, branching off, even in the human anatomy — branches, trees, veins,” she added.
The small show is worth a long look, taking the time to read the artists’ individual statements (usually something I avoid). Anne Doris-Eisner’s accompanying text may suggest that when it comes to self revelation, words well chosen may trump any visual self-portrait.
Eisner beside her “River of Time,” black acrylic paint on paper.
“With the tools in my hand,” she writes, “ready to make art, my face becomes more translucent and I listen to that private self. It speaks in images and metaphors, in lighter and darker hues, and in lines and marks. As I work, my face falls away, and I begin freely to explore the complexities of who I am in relationship with this mysterious other side. What emerges results from the conversation of these two faces.”
The other artists contributing to the exhibition are Corina Alvarez de Lugo, Jessica Cuni, Oi Fortin, Fethi Meghelli, and Thuan Vu. More Than A Face runs through Jan. 2, 2015.
