The Regalia of the New Republic: the work of Sarah Smith
I was six years old during the Bicentennial celebration of this country’s birth and what I remember most clearly about that year was the 4th of July parade. My entire family dressed in colonial garb and stood along Hackensack Street in Bergen County, NJ, waving to the similarly attired Minutemen who recreated the route taken by Washington and his troops two hundred years previous. Afterwards, permanent navy-and-gold signs were erected to mark that same path, and though I walked passed one on a daily basis, it was years before I bothered to notice what had actually been commemorated was Washington’s retreat from and near defeat at the hands of the British.
It is within such disjointed spaces such as this - between the real history of a place and the history that one is taught, or between that teaching and its subsequent recall – that Sarah Smith situates her drawings and wall tableaux . She reassembles the regalia of the New Republic into contemporary allegories in which might succumbs to disillusionment and certainty yields to loss. In the visual narratives Smith offers her audience, banners, radiant bursts, crowns of acanthus leaves, and neoclassical friezes share the same space and temporality as tree stumps, burnt and broken arrows, preying eagles, and prone wolves.
The term “theatre of war” is used to delineate the specific geographic region where a conflict occurs, but once removed from that context, carries the implication of spectacle and posturing, of prevarication and illusion. There is a close link between the current war’s theatricality – particularly in its false pretenses, its punditry, and our sense of removal from it- and the construction of Smith’s drawings, either on paper or as sculpture. It is not accidental that she utilizes the same muslin employed in constructing backdrops or, as in Overture to Memory’s Passage, her 2005 installation at Kala Art Institute, approximates a proscenium arch from Doric columns morphing into broken tree trunks. Theatre is both escape and illusion, and Smith traffics heavily in the need to convey and preserve illusion.
What distinguishes Smith’s work from theatre, her tableaux from stage sets, is the lack of human presence. Her installations do not intend to be immersive, nor do her narratives require human actors in order to unfold. In other words, the scenes she creates are not in limbo, waiting to be activated by their audience. They already exist as part of a continuum that presupposes them; embedded in a collective memory that conflates history and myth in order to point to glory. The symbols that recur throughout Smith’s works are loaded with this memory, but cannot bear the weight of it.
For example, in Strongly into the Everafter, a 2006 wall sculpture installed at Stay Gold Gallery in Brooklyn, an eagle with wings outstretched perches on a shield of draped cloth supported by branches, from which hang garlands of roses entwined with song birds. The roses are wilted, however; the branches are bare, and the birds limp and lifeless. As a result, the imposing eagle resembles less a majestic bird of prey and more a carrion crow. This is not the heraldry of a victorious army; it is the coat of arms of a decimated idealism.
Similarly, in an untitled installation at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2006, 800 arrows encircled the columns in the third floor exhibition space of the former military barracks. Smith borrows the composition directly from the crepuscular rays frequently found on altarpieces to denote the glory of God. In this piece, though, all the arrows were broken and the end of each was charred. The arrow is a loaded symbol, acting both a weapon and a graphic representation of direction or force. For Smith, the number added another layer of significance, as a quantity concrete enough to be recognized but too large to be quickly counted. Any individual arrow was lost in the mass of them – just as an individual soldier is more readily recognized as a statistic of war.
Nothing is whole and nothing is new. Every element is recycled, not only her recurring emblems, but her materials and colors as well. Smith restricts her palette to sepia washes, browns, and grays. A composite gold leaf is a recent addition, but even that is corroded with acid to sketch out her figures. Besides the acid, she draws with acrylic and ink, on muslin and most frequently, salvaged wood. Her choice of materials and palette enforce a particular stance towards her symbolism, simultaneously one of nostalgia and of distance. Again, Smith does not have the intention to immerse the viewer in her allegories. While her imagery possesses an historical specificity and resides in collective memory, there is no emotional resonance to the symbols themselves. Instead, the nostalgia that is evoked is for a set of ideals that were lost long before they were learned.
Perhaps, then the most poignant figure that occurs in her tableaux is a lone wolf, reduced in scale, caught up in webs and chains, or standing at a precipice. It exists in a stillness that becomes an eternity. It is not predatory; instead, it bears the burden of representing both the inception and the decline of an empire, one often invoked in comparison to our own. It resides, as we might, in the void between the idealism and hubris, glory and destruction.
PATRICIA MALONEY 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment