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Jennifer Wilkey, Day 47, digital inkjet, knitted wool, jenniferwilkey.com.
This weekend, I actually made it out to two art openings, after a long spell of being a shut-in-ist. And I was very glad. I am going to write about each separately, since they were very different shows; tomorrow I'll recap the Saturday opening of Fire Island at phd Gallery.
On Friday, I went to see A New Currency at Snowflake/Citystock.This is an an international show (it was recently mentioned in the NYT by Chuck Close), but it's not a touring show. Or, at least, the art does not go on the road--the idea does. Per Snowflake:
"Art often acts as a sign of the times and the effect of today’s economy on the art market seems to be no exception. The current recession has hit it hard, affecting the actions of artists, curators, critics and buyers. Directed by curator Dan Cameron (Prospect New Orleans), a group of thirty-one MFA students at the School of Visuals Arts have developed the exhibition A New Currency as an artist’s response to these changing economic circumstances on the contemporary art community.
A New Currency in St. Louis will be a part of the global impact of the exhibition, joining cities around the world such as Los Angeles, D.C., Seoul and Taipei, to explore the current trends and feelings of artists in each city...Looking at each of these artists’s perspective of what is current in our artistic community; A New Currency shows the power of the individual artist to define his or her own career and share with the rest of us a sign of the times."
The St. Louis curators, Cole Root and Amy Blomme, chose work by Bruce Burton (who, has, by the way, a show coming up at PSTL Gallery on July 10), Nate Chung, Eric Hall, Mike Schuh and Jennifer Wilkey. I quite liked Mike Shuh's version of 52 pickup -- black spay-painted cards, thrown on the floor of the gallery -- as well as Eric Hall's contraption, silver metal tubing attached to a series of amps and pedals and other noisy gadets. When you threw coins down the tube, it would make a beautiful racket, sort of a combination of ocean surf and shopping carts falling from the sky.
But it was Jennifer Wilkey's work that really got me in the solar plexus. Wilkey, who graduated from SIU-E in 2005, is now attending graduate school in Syracuse, N.Y., and combines handcraft with photography. The pieces included in A New Currency are from her Hospital series, including a medical recliner reupholstered with hand-embroidered fabric, an IV drip bag filled with handmade fabric medallions that are reminscent of human cells, and a series of affecting photographs -- like the one above -- that will resonate with anyone who has ever had to pass time in a hospital, whether as patient or worried other. She says of Hospital:
"Monotony, repetition, and duration of my craft explore the longevity of illness and the feeling of sameness associated with being in the hospital. While enclosed in a hospital room, life continues on in the outside world and in a sense, passes the patient by. Time becomes an element that exists in a slow motion within the hospital and is hurrying by beyond its doors."
I visited Wilkey's site, and discovered a cache of thoughtful and superlatively executed art. Though Wilkey uses her personal experiences as material, her work rises far above that, illuminating the larger experience of being human. Her series of photographs of her developmentally disabled brother, James, for instance, are not sentimental or mawkish; however, though they were produced with a clear eye, they are still wonderfully tender. Procedures, a series of video shorts related to Hospital that are meant to evoke the experience of being a patient, features Wilkey, barefoot in the snow, kitting an endless red scarf whose appearance is meant to evoke blood, EKG readouts and knitting away the time in the waiting room (or hospital bed) all at once.
You can see work from other artists and follow this project's progress on the New Currency blog, which also features an awesome I HAS A KAROT/Euro graphic at the top. --Stefene Russell
