There is a saying in Iroquois folklore that it is difficult to stand in two canoes at once. No doubt Seneca artist and teacher Marie Watt is familiar with the feeling. Her “Blanket Stories” and multi media paintings are on display at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts’ new exhibition, “Album: Shifting Native Stories.”
People don’t think much about blankets until they need them. Blankets get thrown over chairs, stacked in corners and stuffed in closets, blending in with the everyday utilitarian items strewn about a busy house.
Before earning her MFA from Yale, Marie Watt, of Seneca descent, studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, one of the venues lor her traveling exhibition Blanket Stories: Ladder. Its centerpiece was a group of 8-fool sculptures, the most imposing of which, Three Sisters (Cousin Rose, Sky Woman, Four Pelts, and All My Relations), 2004, consists of three looming stacks of folded wool blankets, each rising from a wood dais an the way to the ceiling. Watt – who could be called the anti-Andre – has taken what’s flat and horizontal and, through repetition and accumulation, given it verticality and height. In its impressive ascent, one of the stacks assumes a dancing, serpentine pose; the bodily associations are evocative, as are alusions to Native American culture – specifically, the importance of the woven blanket as an object of status and trade, or sale to whites. But Watt’s blankets are all ordinary plaids, stripes or solids, with borders of satin, selvage or fringe. She collected them far and wide; inventory tags occasionally poke out of the stack, bearing her notes in red ink on condition, color, binding, pattern.
For those who have been following the work of Marie Watt over the past several years, Blanket Stories: Receiving may come as a surprise. For one thing, her past sculpture and installations have often explored sculptural materials that are physically resistant and even indurate. Her monumental, elegant, bridgelike Pedestrian (2001), originally sited at River Overlook Park near the Steel Bridge in Portland, was made of slate, stone, and structural steel. Another contrasting work—and one with an added layer of irony because of its subject matter—is Watt’s 2002 installation Sleep and Sleeplessness: Blanket/Sieve, in which she crafted a bed pillow and “covering” out of milky alabaster set on the hard gallery floor. Watt’s current body of work, using discarded or secondhand wool blankets, seems at first like a complete reversal of her sculptural media. In fact, the blanket series only underscores the deftness of Watt’s abilities with formal qualities (i.e., materials) and her deep fascination with the quotidian elements of human nature. “I am particularly drawn to human stories and rituals implicit in everyday objects,” Watt has said. Blankets — as objects and as concept — yield a deep vein of possibilities.
For two years, Marie Watt collected blankets. Scratchy woolen relics, darned and patched, rescued from thrift stores and attics, hundreds of stories contained within their frayed satin bindings, silent witnesses to our private moments of sleep and sleeplessness, our sadnesses and our passions, our unspoken dreams.