Some of us grasp for what is easily in reach. Others reach for what is beyond our grasp. The photography and crafts exhibit showing through October at Hodges Taylor Gallery offers work from many artists who’ve reached for and achieved a sustained, confident and lyrical proficiency. It also shows works from one artist who has reached her assured and tremulous hand into explored but unmapped territory. And she found something.
The artists from Penland School of Crafts deliver fine art within easy reach. This month continues and ends the show of 50 Penland artists from across the nation. Offerings from the school’s friends — those artists who have profited by affiliation with one of the best craft art schools in the country — are selling works in commemoration of Penland’s 75th Anniversary Celebration.
A portion from all the sales benefits Penland, and the entirety of each sale wholly benefits the buyer. You could choose blindfolded here and walk home happy. All this work — glassware, ceramics, wood and metalwork — bears the touch of artisans who wrestled comfortably with media within easy reach of their talents. There is easy elegance or eloquent brutishness to each piece. The work is also comfortably within reach of most pocketbooks.
A ceramic coffee mug by Kent McLaughlin sells for $16 and the handpainted dinner table serving as the gallery display table goes for $8,500. Between those poles are tea sets, candlesticks, pitchers and platters, everyday objects made uncommon under the artist’s turn of hand.
Fred Fenster’s covered pewter vessel is a small tin man torso with a pyramid cap on a headless smokestack neck. The torso is twisted, appearing to have been slightly buckled in a vise.
Karen Newgard’s pitcher and platter are embossed with illustrations of birds and branches. The images are delicately scooped out, giving the appearance of woodcuts laid over the face of the plate and wrapped around the belly of the pitcher.
Some of the work is either spoken for or gone. One of Boris Bally’s “Transit Chairs” — steel chairs fashioned from recycled street signs — has sold. The pedestrian walk sign was carefully cut, bent, riveted and reborn into a new utilitarian object still bearing the design and dings of its former life function. The kids who further ding and scratch the chair will squabble over ownership rights in a generation. I suspect many Penland objects wind up heirlooms.
Sometimes artists will overreach and grab hold of the wholly unexpected. That’s discovery time for the artist, and a time for the artist to decide to pull back (in fear or revulsion) or hold fast and move on to the next territory. The best will plow on through the untrammeled ground. Photographer Susan Harbage Page does that.
Page’s sepia-toned, silver gelatin prints were all produced from her ancient Polaroid cameras. There is a coincidental congruency between the images in this work and the battered and worn look of the cameras she uses. One camera is a lever-activated, accordion cloth creature from instant picture infancy; her other camera is a modified “pinhole Polaroid” and it looks just sufficiently taped together to last one more trip. Page’s photographs all look older than her cameras, and a few look culled from before time.
Page is an intellectual and like all good intellectuals, she’s got explanations. The explanation for these photographs concerns Involuntary Memory, a concept the artist came across reading the work of philosopher Walter Benjamin. Benjamin espoused the notion that childhood memories cannot be initially mined through the intellect, but only through chance encounters with objects, or the sensations objects arouse in us.
Marcel Proust bit into a pastry and was carried back to childhood memories that spawned remembrances stout enough to fill a book. And though Proust discovered the past is somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect, finding the key object or sensation to open that door, in his words, “depends entirely upon chance whether we come upon it before we die or whether we never encounter it.”
Susan Harbage Page’s photographs prod chance. She’s looking to take a bite into her past. But it appears she has found something else in the pantry while searching out Proust’s pastry: three portals with views to eternity.
Three of these photographs are blessed with no need for explanation: “Evidence of Grace,” “View from Cassis,” and “Perdition.” These photographs reach beyond what Page is going after, beyond pricked memories, past the intellectual construct posited by Benjamin’s theory of “Involuntary Memory.” They grab hold of something better, a piece of eternity.
“Evidence of Grace” is a photograph of a woven oval object encased by four walls. The reedy porous handmade object appears enclosed in a tomb, is wrapped around a vacant vaginal space, and rests below a cumulous fog. The reedy thing is mordant and humble and is homage to someone who left a permanent vacancy in passing.
“View from Cassis” is a meditation on light, water and ground. It is inside looking out, a muted sun behind a choppy cloud, hung in a dimly illuminated sky at dawn or dusk. A dark cliff pushes in from the left, small and black against the dull light and dark cloud. This earth is empty, primal and vast.
“Perdition” is an asphalt road, moonlit and isolated. A guardrail runs along one side, a casual indication of the black chasm beyond the road’s edge. The slick, moonshined asphalt curves and disappears into shadowed vegetation. The road is an invitation to the intrepid and a warning to the timid. I get the distinct feeling this is the only road; anyone who wants to travel must travel this path. The destination is unknown and likely perilous.
It’s beyond our reach. Let’s go.
The Penland exhibit and Susan Harbage Page’s photographs are on display through October 30 at Hodges Taylor Gallery, Transamerica Square, 401 N. Tryon St. For more information, call 704-334-3799 or visit www.hodgestaylor.com.
This article appears in Oct 6-12, 2004.
