Emily Pothast’s Eternal Return at Grey Gallery & Lounge

Unfortunately for me, the eternal return lasted only three minutes. Alas, I was asked to leave Grey Gallery & Lounge at 6:30pm today because I was unwittingly intruding on a private party. I hadn’t seen the sign on the door, as it was held open for me by people who were oddly sizing me up as though they were trying to decide if they were going to let me attend their private party. Right.  But the three minutes I did have to look at Emily Pothast‘s collages were lovely.  I felt like I was peering into a personal cosmogony. They are much different in person than on screen; more topographical, mapping out a physical landscape as well as an intellectual/spiritual one. On the screen, they struck me as quiet and meditative, and in person they are bold with intensity barely contained in the tiny cut shapes. Really great both ways, actually.

The first time I came across Emily’s work (clicking around on Seattle art blogs), I became very excited and was convinced that she was my artistic other half and that really we ought to join forces and take over the world or start our own club or art movement or something. I can get worked up. But mostly I’m calm and would settle for coffee like a normal person. Our styles and methods of working are different, but we share similar concerns. On her blog, she articulates and elaborates on many concepts that I have left largely unsaid in the artist statements I’ve written. It is satisfying to see it written; to see someone thinking about the same things.

Favorites, No. 1: Mariele Neudecker’s Winterreise

On days that I would like to get out and be inspired by art in person, but the baby is not wearing his sociable face, I will revisit my favorite works of art seen in days past.

I saw Mariele Neudecker‘s Winterreise (A Winter’s Journey) at Temple Bar Gallery in Dublin in 2005.  Projected large on the wall in a dark room, Winterreise is a series of 24 short films with music.  The films correspond to Schubert‘s 24 songs in the song cycle also titled Winterreise. Schubert’s 1827 Winterreise sets to music 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller.

In Neudecker’s Winterreise, Schubert’s song cycle, with voice and piano, plays on a loop along with the film. Müller’s poems float as English text over slowly changing imagery.  The film uses scenes of landscape and life on the 60th degree of latitude on the globe. Winter. Iceland, Russia, the Shetland Islands. Sometimes the images mirror the poems in content, sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes the images breathe contemporary content into the poems, striking and perfect. There is the feeling of being held in suspension between the old and the new, with the combination of the old music and the new medium of video/installation. They go beautifully together.

I sat through the whole cycle with eyes like saucers, in disbelief at how perfect it all was. Then I came back the next week and sat through it again, taking pictures of each scene. I wanted to have something to remember it by.