Marie Watt’s work contains its own thanks, in the stories of the donated wool blankets she uses to create her fabric, wood, and metal sculptures.
Stop by the Artspace Gallery and see if you can figure out how the 15-foot-high column of folded blankets keeps from falling over. The piece is part of Marie Watt’s new show, “Blanket Stories.”
Over the history of the Oregon Biennial, the Portland Art Museum learned that it’s impossible to please everyone. When the museum announced that it would eschew the ever-divisive Biennial for the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, the prospect of a show that would whittle down its participants to five artists and expand its geographical reach to include Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming in addition to Oregon hardly seemed like the solution. Yes, it would provide visitors with a richer experience, allowing them to dig more deeply into the work of a handful of artists. But it would also shift the focus from homegrown talent. (In fact, only one of the five finalists, Marie Watt, is an Oregonian; the rest hail from Washington.)
The highbrow Portland Art Museum has gone lowbrow in its Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, which replaced the museum’s Oregon Biennial this year. For what it is and how it does it, CNAA is a superb show, but it’s no substitute for the Biennial. Museum brass decided to swap the sprawling Biennial for the more tightly focused Awards, figuring it was better to showcase a dozen pieces by five artists than to show only one or two pieces by 20-plus artists. The Awards are deep where yesteryear’s Biennial was broad, weighted toward Washington artists where the Biennial favored Oregonians. Nevertheless, they brilliantly capture listless Gen-X Cascadians at the height of their lowbrow ennui.
The Portland Art Museum’s changeover from the Oregon Biennial to the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards to showcase home-grown talent is like a dinner party with the guest list being downsized to a more intimate dinner for five.
I dropped by the studio of artist Marie Watt the other day, where she was in the middle of her latest project—a piece to be displayed this June at the Portland Art Museum in an exhibit highlighting the work of the winners of the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards. (Watt was one of five winners selected from a field of 28 finalists.)
When Marie Watt was creating Braid (2004), a spectacular wall hanging distinguished by a lopsided infinity sign made from geometric patches of cloth sewn onto brown blankets, she turned to friends and family for help. “I realized I could spend two years personally hand-stitching, or I could be creative about finishing in a timely manner,” she says. “That’s how the sewing circles evolved.” Over the past several years, Watt, whose lineage is part Seneca and part German-Scottish homesteader, has been making work that plays on the history and physical nature of blankets, an important cultural signpost in the relations between Indians and non-Indians and simultaneously a symbol of intimacy. Hung on the wall as abstract emblems, piled high into sculptures, or transformed into bronze and wood totem pole-like configurations, her blanket works evoke numerous and layered associations. “Community is a big part of my work. It is a family value, and I think it is fair to say it’s a tribal value,” says Watt. “I also like how it relates artistically to the teaching of Joseph Beuys, his notion of social sculpture.”
At first, Marie Watt’s decision to use blankets as the principal medium in Tread Lightly, her current show at PDX Contemporary Art, seems a little curious. Then again, most of us formed one of our first intense attachments to a blanket. And it’s easy to see why: All the psychological value a blanket offers – warmth, security, protection – is embodied in sensuous physical terms. Although Watt builds off this near-universal connection to blankets, her assemblages also gain meaning from an exploration of materials and art historical references.
The delicacy of a moth’s wing, the shadowy space between the clock and the bed that looms large during a bout of insomnia: small details fill Marie Watt with wonder and become the basis for thoughtful, elegant works of art. Through her art, she draws attention to the unnoticed parts of our lives. “I am particularly drawn to the human stories and rituals implicit in everyday objects,” she has said. “Like blankets, bridges, and doorknobs. Made familiar by use and scaled to the body, they often go unnoticed, but make me think about the relationship between part and whole; I wish to capture this sense of familiarity in the objects I make.”
The exhibition “No Reservations: Native American History and Culture in Contemporary Art” curated by Richard Klein for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgfield, Connecticut, about a one hour drive from Manhattan, may prove to be one of the most unique and influential projects of the season. The strategy and critical thinking of combining cutting edge work by emerging native and non native artists treating controversial issues of history and culture related to the legacy of indigenous people, is a landmark and template for future efforts.