Kathleen "K" Stevenson's Simple Lullaby, at the Charleston Heights Arts Center through May 16, is a show of hands, with strings attached.
Make that threads. The common elements stitched through the artist's mixed-media work are thread and its corporeal counterpart, hair. And often the former connects or entwines human hands. For instance, in the suite of "Simple Attachments," "Simple Habits" and "Simple Possibilities," each comprising chine colle paper sheets with photo-lithographed impressions of hands, actual thread either connects or drapes from the printed images, all inside a shadow-box frame of architectural molding.
The printed images, here and in the "Simple Stains" suite, at times seem like ghosts of early photography, at other times like faint sketches. The works are superbly executed, about hands and the possibilities they suggest; craft, cradling, prayer and expression.
Perception is one of Stevenson's key themes, along with memory—points which arise in her sculptural work. The first thing you notice in the room is "Memory Bed #1/"Further In," composed of a single bed frame supporting a glass plate and several inches of water, set astir by pumps. The water ripples over stones and echoes below on a blond-wood platform. The stones spell out a poem, but the letters break up, the stones scattered, as it proceeds. The text to Tomas Transtomer's poem, translated by Robin Fulton, is posted on a wall nearby; it concerns escaping a traffic jam to "walk in the footsteps of the badger" and seek a magic stone.
Stevenson is that rare artist who provides supporting information, and perhaps too much. Whether or not you buy into the memory-perception angle, it is a mystical and mesmerizing installation.
Full-Figured Art
We shift the scene from hands to full-body contact at the Contemporary Arts Collective, where Body of Work continues through April 25. Three local artists, Wendy Kveck, Julie Madden and Jennifer McKeon, teamed up for three different explorations of the human body. A list of titles was not ready on the show's opening day, so a general overview of each will have to suffice.
Kveck's figural studies are broadly worked and a little messy, deceptively so because they also are keenly observant. Her female figures are mostly depicted in underwear, but almost blandly posed, as if to drain away all conventional allure. Two canvases flank a watercolor (or maybe gouache), each depicting the same figure in a similar reclined-on-side pose. The color schemes are sometimes harsh, as in a vertically mounted version of the same pose, rendered in morbid blues and pink, but the overall effect is striking.
Madden's paintings examine flesh as an abstract concept, divorced from its owners; whether as a tabula rasa for tattoos or as the spooky, weblike membrane stretched over two upturned palms or a lifted foot. The latter is the focus of a tall, narrow painting depicting the rear lower-half of a figure in denim, the bottom of one foot turned up. It is, to be sure, one body part not often the subject of serious painting but Madden tackles it shrewdly.
McKeon depicts richly toned, sometimes glare-hot torsos, either flat or contorted. One figure rests its head on a blue pillow which takes on the aspect of angel wings. A female figure, its head unseen, is apparently viewed from underneath a sheet of glass on which a swath of flesh is pressed. Her paintings are at once fierce and oddly detached.
Strong work, all around.