Exhibition 3.12052009 at MVSEVM

By Madeleine Bailey

How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?

I had that advertisement rushing through my head as I walked through this show.  Maybe that phrase is nostalgic.  Maybe it’s a breath of exhaustion. Or frustration. The harboring of the inevitable urge to bite down…

"Shapes" by Sarah Eliot (left, on floor) & "8 vignettes" by Joe Craig (right, video)

There were no owls in MVSEVM’s Exhibition 3.12052009 but there were geometries, shapes that were meant to be stepped on, digested, and absorbed. From Sarah Eliot’s Shapes (cloths arranged in a geometric rug on the floor with a corresponding key on the wall) to art that was literally edible, there was a lot to sink your teeth into. Most expansive was Alison Rhoades’s I Don’t Believe In The Sun, a series of delicate and humorous vignettes in which Rhoades took an entire page out of Julia Kristeva’s novel Black Sun and repurposed the text into individualized sculptural moments of description (e.g.  “Thing” “and” “Object” were individually carved into three shriveling apples casually placed next to the wine, while easily missed was “The Center of Attraction and Repulsion,” text chosen to mark the bottom of the rust-stained bathtub). These tongue and cheek morsels of domesticity allowed for an exploration of the space that, like the discovery of Eliot’s key, turned searching for ways into the work into a game. This is the feeling that comes with the end of a sentence, that knowledge of starting with something tangible that leads off, away from entry points, into the poetic and the unexplored. This is a breath.  That feeling of needing to stop. And to approach the work again.

Part of "I Don't Believe in the Sun" by Alison Rhoades

Although much of the work relied in some way upon text and language, ultimately these were pieces that did not all seem to fit together comfortably.  Or that they once did, but have since grown to no longer be able to occupy the same space.  Stumbling onto elements that were in turn insubstantial, immaterial, material, and consumable, so much of the work seemed bent on withholding, reshuffling, and scrambling meanings at will that I was a little at a loss.  Which is why I found myself relying on geometries, of existence, of experience, and of engagement. Invisible architectures, those that tie us to the material world, challenged the position of my body. The grainy postcard materializations of invisible columns in Joe Craig’s video piece 8 vignettes, the defiance of gravity in Zak Arctander’s sculpture On Straw, in which a shovel swayed, precariously suspended off of the floor by a bendy straw, let me exist between the material and the imagined.

"Dead Dogs & Hair" by Cameron Crawford (book in cabnet)

Despite all of this, I still I found myself continuously searching through the layers for that center, those element(s) that would tie these works together, thematically or otherwise. Here, between these disparate narratives, are choices at once obvious and cryptic, immediate yet puzzling. How many licks does it take? The world may never know…