Amid the recent spate of art fairs and summer exhibitions, a few things have firmly taken root in my mind. One of those is Recollections, the third annual summer showcase of members’ work at Actualize AiR. Curated by Shannon Hobbs, the exhibit is loosely organized around the theme of memory—people, places, and things loved, lost, forgotten, or summoned from the dredges of the subliminal. Lots of madeleine-coded things, in the best way.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that threads of multiples, castings, pressings, and impressions thread through the exhibition. Tommy Gregory’s everyday items cast in indelible bronze. Everyday hands (grasping vapes) cast in milk-white plaster (Rachael Comer) or hands cast in translucent in beeswax (Nadia Ahmed). A drawing by Lila Alexis Thomas—a monument to Black sapphic love—unfolds a tender tangle of flesh where the delicate lines and melted smudges of charcoal read like a record of impressions left by the weight of Thomas’s hand.
A set of six panels by Julia Freeman are less about longing and more an inquisition into the complexities of history. Crown and Cross: I-VI form a tight grid across one wall, covered in colonial quilt block patterns made from fragments of fabric pressed into deliciously creamy slabs of joint compound tinted with synthetic blood. The impressions map out a cryptic geometry in tones of delicate peachy, pinkish, and brownish iron-red: the feeling of skin, faintly, but also bloodshed.
In the center of the gallery, Mary Anne Carter’s caution signs, rendered in translucent colored glass, light up the floor. One, a candy-cane-striped, end-of-road traffic barricade made with fused red-and-white glass, is attached to a set of actual metal A-frame legs (which Carter presumably pinched from an actual street). Another is a glass simulacrum of a “wet floor” caution sign, made of two translucent, lemony-yellow panels, complete with tumbling stick figure, hinged at the top with a metal joint. The warm summer sun shooting through the glass casts a stained shadow of light that pools on the ground. (Can a shadow be made of color, of light? Carter has made it so.)
Carter says the pieces are about climate change and the increasingly delicious, balmy summers unfolding in the Pacific Northwest—so nice on the surface, but loaded with uncertainty and foreboding.
The piece that has me most in its grip is one made by Kalina Chung. The title quizzically begins with an ellipsis: …flowers are not supposed to last. Chung’s flower is a big, gangly, awkward thing made of thick, flesh-colored skating tights stretched over a stem-like metal armature. The stem is planted into a thick block, which is sitting on a metal tray on the floor. I’ve gone back to see Chung’s flower three times now. The first time, the block didn’t register as ice. In fact, the evening of the first encounter (at the crowded reception), the flower was lying supine on the floor. I took it in for a moment, snapped a photo, and walked past without giving it much thought.
The next afternoon during the curator’s walk-through, the flower was standing upright and the giant jolie-laide petals—now more clearly visible—were encrusted with rhinestones that glittered across the stretched head. While the crowd’s attention was focused on another work, the block of ice suddenly shuddered, slipped, and toppled, and along with it the fleshy lycra flower. The cube had been slowly melting this whole time. When the piece slid from upright to horizontal, the onlookers tittered and gasped.
Chung was raised on the ice—a child trained to be a professional ice skater. Now she makes art, but the skating slips in.
It’s impossible to look at Chung’s piece and not to think of melting ice caps, or icebergs calving, splitting, and upending. Like Carter’s work, this feels like it’s hinting at something ominous, a kind of ice-age sundial keeping track of time according to the warmth and sun piercing the atmosphere. The flower in the ice becomes a canary in the coal mine.
But it’s also funny, in an absurd way. And maybe pathetic, too? Or is this about persistence and muscle memory: She topples and gets back up, day after day. The accompanying text Chung leaves us with doesn’t give away too much. I can’t help wondering if answers lie in what’s implied by that ellipsis—a part of the statement that came before and was broken off? Was it some kind of reassurance about cycles? It’s okay because…?
When I arrived at the gallery a third time, it was very early in the morning and the flower had not yet been planted upright in its ice block (which waited ready in a nearby freezer). Once planted, it took approximately 30 minutes for the sun to do its work. The ice eroded, the water pooled, and the flower fell once more.
Maybe the reason this slow, slow metronome is so good is because it requires presence. You can’t experience this work of art unless you, in your meat suit, walk into this physical space and experience the passage of time and watch something as mundane as literal ice melting, which is not really mundane at all, but cataclysmic: the sign of our time.
