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Pretty Tough Women at the Aldrich
Contemporary Storytelling in Connecticut
by Edgar Allen Beem
Though I have only been there twice, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, is one of my favorite New England art institutions, focused as it is on bring new art and recent trends to a wider audience. You can be pretty sure of finding art that will expand your awareness and appreciation of what art can be any time you visit the Aldrich.
In Pretty Tough: Contemporary Storytelling (through January 3, 2010), curator Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, who came to the Aldrich from the Guggenheim last fall, has assembled the works of nine women artists, all of whom take novel approaches to 21st narratives. The artists work in a variety of media and bring a great ethnic diversity to bear on visual storytelling.
Ambreen Butt, for instance, is a Pakistani-born artist who works in Boston. She draws on the tradition of Persian miniature painting to create drawings on Mylar that speak to the experiences of modern Muslim women.
Kate Clark, a New York artist born and bred, provides some of the most startling objects in Pretty Tough in the form of taxidermy sculptures that put human faces on wild animals - gazelle, zebra, bison. Stretching a zebra hide over clay and foam in "Matriarch," Clark creates a fascinating and disturbing trophy mount that embodies a story about both the death of nature and cultural attitudes about women.
Orly Cogan, an Israeli artist working in New York, uses vintage textiles to create overlay narratives about the exploitation and subjugation of women, a perfect correspondence between female needle arts and feminism.
Amy Cutler, whose work was featured in my October 9, 2008, posting, uses traditional illustration techniques and a light surrealism to create appealingly peculiar drawings of social and family life.
Kyung Jeon, a New Jersey-born artist, uses traditional Korean rice paper, watercolor, pencil and gouache in personal narratives that draw on Asian aesthetics and her own experience.
Catarina Leitão, a Portuguese artist in New York, creates little pop-up books that depict people in protective clothing struggling against the forces of a toxic world.
Brazilian-born Rosana Palazyan is an artist of Armenian ancestry who embroiders handkerchiefs to commemorate both personal and cultural loss.
Argentinean artist Liliana Porter incorporates toy figurines in canvases that amount to inchoate narratives of human survival, female figures working to clean up the very paintings themselves.
And Stacey Steers of Boulder, Colorado, contributes a video entitled "Phantom Canyon" that uses 4,000 collages of Edward Muybridge motion photographs to create a fantasy narrative of a woman trying to escape the bonds of a hostile world.
"All of the artists in this exhibition use traditional or vintage techniques that are essential to the success of their concepts," writes curator Mónica Ramírez-Montagut. "By engaging traditional modes of expression, their work holds a vast universal appeal while addressing less agreeable issues that are of great relevance in today's society. This highly stylized and crafted work - pretty - offers profound assessments of our contemporary world - tough."
[Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main St., Ridgefield CT, 203-438-4519.]
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