Finely Made 'Constructions' Gives Artist's Images a 'Sanctuary'
The unexpected journeys artists take through their work often begin
with the need to achieve a relatively simple, specific goal. Michele Ogilvie's finely
made "Constructions," on view at Sherry Frumkin Gallery, evolved from her
efforts to stop the deterioration of her photographs. "By etching the photo
into metal, I'm symbolically immortalizing it." she said. About two years ago, she also had the urge to place these photographs of such subjects as trees, leaves, fruit, flowers and birds within three-dimensional box structures, giving each image "a sanctuary," she said.
She continued to build the boxes, some of metal, some of wood. She included doors and windows and the natural objects photographed: seeds, willow branches, feathersó and metal pieces in the shapes of circles and squares. She had made about a dozen of them before she stopped to consider what they meant to her.
It was a subconscious release. After I had all this work in my studio, I had to ask myself why I did this," she said. She realized that the work was "tied in with what was going on personally, what was going on in the world around me and my relationship with the world. You see what's happening to the planet, and you want to put things in a shrine, a safe place. I'm symbolically trying to protect the fragile. There is a story behind each piece."
Many of the objects within a work come in threes, representing the three parts of the self -- mind, body and soul. Threesomes of seeds, fruits and metal squares in two pieces of an alchemy-inspired series called "Squaring of the Sphere" signify the metamorphosis from the essence of life, to life itself, and finally to the concept of the wholeness of mind and body as symbolized by the squaring of the circle.
Six works are composed of nine boxes, designed in a tick-tack-toe format to express the notion that chance and fate direct a portion of our lives. Among them is "Race Without Reason." Three clocks, one with hands at five minutes to 12, form its center. The four corner boxes contain images of the ocean from virgin sea to its present industrialized state.
In "Taking Feathers From a Wing," made at the time of the riots in Los Angeles last year, Ogilvie shackled feathers to concrete boxes. Although she has provided some written descriptions of the stories in the tick-tack-toe series, these and all of her constructions leave room for viewers' personal interpretations.
Her exploration into why she was making these boxes led her to Carl Jung's theories and novels by Hermann Hesse. Three of her works, "Narcissus and Goldmund," "The Glass Bead Game" and "Steppenwolf," convey the internal dramas of the characters in Hesse's books of the same titles. Like Hesse's characters, Ogilvie is on a personal search and a universal one. All of the stories conveyed through her constructions "relate to existence and loss and finding one's place," she said. "I believe we all carry around these feelings." -- Nancy Kapitanoff
LA Times/Calendar '94
MICHELE OGILVIE at Sherry Frumkin Gallery
SANTA MONICA, CA
The Dadaists and Surrealists transformed the shadow box, a l9th-century children's toy, into an art object capable of expressing deep poetic and philosophical concerns. Artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and the assemblage artists of the 1950's and '60s further developed the shadow box until finally they burst its boundaries altogether and paved the way for full-blown installation. In her recent work Michele Ogilvie brings the poetic and philosophical inclinations of artists like Joseph Cornell together with the micro-and macro-installations of Michael McMillen, wedding them to expanded notions of artists' books to create four interconnected yet distinct bodies of work that bring a whole new twist to the tradition of the shadow box.
Ogilvie enshrines and reifies points of slipping consciousness. She draws the viewer into an inner investigation of memory and experience through an exploration of potentiality (an abstract understanding of what could be), actuality (a physical manifestation of potentiality, or concrete being), and essence (a return to an abstract, metaphorical understanding of the world). Ogilvie shows that experience mediated by memory (so critical to our apprehension of reality) gives rise to questions concerning the intellectual separation of potentiality, actuality and essence. She creates a metaphorical twilight world where the conceptualization of reality is fluid among these states of being. Twilight, the symbol of dichotomy, is the dividing line that at once joins and separates opposites. In these constructions the human struggle to understand existence is suspended between memory and the experience of the physical world. Ogilvie's shadow boxes seek to conserve remnants of the past from the inevitable decay of memory.
The four series, "Window Boxes," "Tic-tac-toe: A System of Chance", "Three Books Inspired by Hermann Hesse" and "Squaring of the Sphere," created between 1991 and 1993, bear a common theme, namely the metamorphosis of experience into the fluid continuum of memory. Ogilvie houses the symbols for our evanescent experience of nature, such as twigs, stones, and sand, in boxes made of wood and metal shaped by her hand. Niches are carved out of these boxes to reveal glimpses or clues of a shifting past. The idea of potentiality is suggested by doorways, either cut into or added onto the boxes, and by seed forms in their "natural"state or rendered in metal. Primary forms, such as highly polished metal cubes and spheres, are used to express the ideal of the transcendence of being into pure form. Ogilvie's efforts to preserve the shifting boundaries of consciousness come to fruition in the translation of the quintessential 20th century symbol for memory, the photograph, into a hardened piece of metal through the process of photo-metal etching. The romantic quality of the traditional landscape photograph is thus transformed into a harsh metal object.
As we move through the work, Ogilvie encourages us to address the intellectual boundaries that divide potentiality, actuality and essence. She asks us to examine whether we lose our potential as we strive for actuality and whether our existence ultimately conflicts with what could be our essence. Each box or page within what could be seen as Ogilvie's larger book becomes a container for revisiting the twilight of our own experience and attendant philosophical questions.-Steven Peckman
VISIONS / SPRING 1994
