Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Mary Bergs, Further Notes on Place and Space, Collaged Papers and Stones, Edgewood College Gallery, Edgewood College, Madison, 2022


A sharp installation in which Bergs' large-scale accordion collage sits perfectly within the elongated display cases leading to the Edgewood College Gallery. Using found materials and "self-made" materials, Bergs creates ephemeral looking collage works that come from a careful awareness of her surroundings and from an appreciation of the beauty to be found in our everyday lives. Below is the artist's statement that accompanies this piece:

"This accordion fold book and accompanying stones are a further investigation into my interest in memory, visual perception and our experience of place. When I first looked at the display case, I immediately thought of a horizon line: a story and these related lines developed into a book project. A horizon line introduces the idea of landscape, memories of places and a sensate experience of place. Images of landscape are often idealized versions of reality that we accept as truth, never questioning how these images impact our perception of our own experience. I am interested in creating situations where non-specific ideas merge, a place where two or more ideas come together to form a relationship, a possibility, a new association. My work explores the linguistic properties of materials and objects, and things that can function as language and be read by the viewer. I invite careful looking at forms and materials where spatial arrangement and changes in texture generate new meanings. I investigate the place where language and objects coincide."

A longtime resident of Minneapolis, Bergs now lives somewhere "in the middle" of Wisconsin with her husband at the edge of the village of Benton.










Annette Messager, Les Uterus Fleurissent (The Uterus Flower), Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2017, ed. 100


A really powerful double-sided accordion by this well-known French artist in which she insists on her autonomy when it comes to her own desires and pleasure. The following quote is taken from the description of the book on her gallery's website: 

"Annette Messager has created numerous artist books over the past 40 years. This new leporello-style artist book offers a partial response to the issue that matters of the female body and a concern that women's desire —and especially their ability to openly express it—continues to be met with resistance. Indeed isn't this desire—women's desire—precisely the desire to be able to, as females, manifest, affirm, and express themselves?"

For an excellent review by Joseph Nechvatal of a 2016 show Messager had at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris, he addresses how she "...deploys an iconography of anti-patriarchal anger rooted in the female body," see:
https://hyperallergic.com/344804/a-uterus-flipping-the-bird-and-other-images-of-feminist-exasperation/


20 pages, double-sided, each page 3.25"(h) and 2"(w), when opened 2ft 2".

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