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Jul 3, 2009
One look at the work of the artist Aldwyth, and words like "obsessed," "possessed," "fixated," and "fanatical" immediately come to mind. As for the audience, "fascinated," "enthralled," and "mesmerized" barely describe the reactions. The visitor enters the gallery only to be overwhelmed by the stuff the artist uses to make her objects. It takes some concentrated looking to get past the minutiae and discover there is a grand scheme behind each piece.
Mark Sloan, director and senior curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, the exhibition's curator, explained that "work" as a noun and verb are included in the exhibition title to highlight the work as objects of art and the effort that went into their creation.
Aldwyth makes huge paintings and tiny ones and covers every inch with fragments cut from newspapers, magazines, books, product labels. Her materials are scraps that began life as one thing and, in her hands, become something else.
Besides the paintings, she uses discarded household objects that were various containers or odd pieces of furniture and covers them with materials cut and snipped from every available source. She also reuses toys, machinery parts and pieces of unknown origin and affixes them to the core objects.
One of the easier of the large paintings to tackle is "The World According to Zell" and that is because she used one source for the entire work. She began with the 1871 "Zell's Popular Encyclopedia," which she carefully separated page by page and then cut each image from those pages. She expunged the captions and explanations and then reconstructed the scraps according to her own train of thought. Every single image had to be used or, in her mind, it would not become a new source for information. Nothing is haphazard; every scrap is carefully and thoughtfully added.
From a distance "Zell" looks like a Persian miniature, writ huge, or a quilted tapestry with an Oriental archway in its center. Close inspection reveals large urns of flora and fauna in the middle, framed by progressions of figures that include anatomical examples and costumed historical figures. On each side are heads of famous people from history. Across the bottom are cities, animals and other costumed figures from every era of time. According to the catalogue essay by Rosamond Purcell, Aldwyth makes no religious references in her collages, yet the infinitesimal details suggest a "multitude: everyone who ever existed."
Her reworked furniture and collaged cigar boxes can keep the viewer so absorbed there is little time for anything else. "Re-su-me/re-sume," 2001, is an example of an apothecary's box with little cubby holes the artist has stuffed with snippets of text that might resemble parts of a resume. One that caught my eye was "played chess with Marcel Duchamp." Her version of Twitter, I thought, except the 140 character social network was not invented in 2001.
Among the objects are 26 cigar boxes, each focusing on a letter of the alphabet. Three zebras, probably rescued from a "Smithsonian Magazine," a zipper and pictures of a 1950s Zoot suit and parts of the Zodiac decorate "Cigar Box Encyclopedia (Z)."
Aldwyth's art looks like outsider art, yet she is anything but an outsider artist. She has a BFA from the University of South Carolina and has had more than a dozen artistic residencies and fellowships, including the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, S.C., and the Allen Stone Gallery in New York. Indeed much of her imagery is about the art world with cutouts from such famous artworks as Michelangelo's "David" and Botticelli's "Birth of Venus."
In her essay, Purcell explains that collage was practiced by Victorian ladies in the 19th century. Collage, however, entered the lexicon of fine art in the early 20th century when Picasso and Braque added bits of menus, numerals, ropes and kitchen utensils to their objects. Once things from the real world found their way into the imagined one of the artists, there was no limit to what could be used and how much could be added. Collage became a favorite of Dada and its progeny, surrealism.
Sloan writes that Aldwyth has worked for two decades in relative seclusion. At the age of 73, she is now ready to send her work out into the art community. After leaving Chapel Hill, the exhibition will travel to the Halsey Institute in Charleston and the Telfair Museum in Savannah.
Blue Greenberg's column appears each week in Entertainment and More. She can be reached at blueg@bellsouth.net or by writing her in c/o The Herald-Sun, P.O. Box 2092, Durham, NC 27702.
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