|
AROUND THE GALLERIES
Piecing together this thing called life
By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times
May 4, 2007
Credit the Dadaists of the early 20th century with introducing
collage as a great metaphor for the fullness and variability of
life. Turning the newly image-based culture on its head, Hannah Höch
cut up magazines and newspapers and reconfigured their parts into
radical commentaries on gender identity and contemporary politics.
Kurt Schwitters pieced together fragments of printed matter into
an entire, word-flecked environment in his famous "Merzbau."
Collage makes room for disparate bits and fleeting impressions,
the precious and the profane. Those splinters can be assembled
into a coherent or discontinuous whole, or left to intermingle
discretely in shared space, according to the artist's temperament.
Maritta Tapanainen's sensibility, as evidenced in
an engrossing mini-survey at Couturier Gallery, is one of
accretion more than disjunction. Elements in her collages resonate
with one another rather than clash or conflict. Shapes rhyme,
loose themes emerge and the life on the page comes to stand for
life as experienced on a physical, biological level — burgeoning
and diverse, wondrous and mysterious.
Tapanainen has consistently drawn from old scientific texts for
her source material, and as the collages progress chronologically
from 1992 to the present, they get larger and increasingly ornate.
"Seed," an early work the size of a large postcard,
combines just a few images in a simple architectonic structure,
rectangles stacked neatly atop one another and set side by side.
Combined, the photographic reproductions of a baby's head, a
seedling, a mechanical fan and a plant stalk imply commonalities
of growth and cyclical motion.
After a few years, Tapanainen stopped using images in such
complete form and has since cut them into fragments — a veined
leaf here, an insect wing there. She also cuts shapes not
necessarily related to the imagery on the paper they're cut from.
Her process brings to mind the way Assemblage artists alter found
objects, incorporating their sense of history and prior function
while endowing them with new identity and purpose. In two collages
from 1994, she weaves snake-like strips cut from printed pages
into a loose, squirming tapestry. Wire springs, plant textures and
animal parts can be glimpsed within the busy field.
By the late '90s, Tapanainen began to incorporate more blank paper
into her collages, using the rich manila, ivory and tea-stained
tones of aged pages to create a dynamic, dimensional ground. Color
makes very few appearances in this selection of works, but it's
not missed. Tapanainen uses a narrow but evocative spectrum,
limited to the grays and blacks of old printed illustrations and
the shades of mellowing paper. A patina of nostalgia infuses the
work even as the imagery conjures vital processes of change and
growth.
"Mystic" (1998) reads as a page of cosmic inquiry into
systems and structures. A photographic reproduction of daisies
resonates with a collaged bouquet of radiating tabs of paper and a
nearby image of a dandelion. Similar clusters of like forms occur
throughout the collage: an aerial grid of a city neighbors the
skeletal structure of a fish, which relates to an image of a woven
basket and so on. The collage, like all of Tapanainen's work,
seems to tap into some primal stream of consciousness, where all
things, reduced to their essence, are interconnected.
Microscopic views of organisms float through many of the works, as
do fragments of machinery, diagrams of arteries, channels,
vessels. Though Tapanainen's compositions are exacting and
precise, summoning you in close to examine their intricacies, the
works also have a sense of expansiveness, as if illustrating
linkages on a macrocosmic and not just a microcosmic level.
Along with the size and complexity of her work, Tapanainen's scope
continues to expand. "Seed" is answered more than a
decade later by "Big Bang" (2006), an extraordinary feat
of visual engineering that ensnares the eye with its efflorescent
network of life becoming, being.
Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323)
933-5557, through May 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .couturiergallery.com
|
Print
E-mail
story
Most
e-mailed
