Gwendolyn Skaggs + press

a poem press release by David Frye

Using color photographs as syllables, words, and phrases, a poem, a recent work of art by Gwendolyn Skaggs, embraces and portrays essential structural elements of poetry in a compelling visual narrative. Thoughtfully ordered, the differing images are linear in arrangement, rhythmic in character, and punctuated horizontally along the wall with occasional breaks that visually intone a modification of context, or broadening of metaphor. The images gain momentum toward an ever developing rhythm-- a staccato of small vignettes becoming layers of narrative and metaphor. Each image carries its own distinctive resonance and when experienced in a line, either one to one, or group to group, their serial effect creates a cohesive visual lyricism that evokes the presence of a tangible, delicately rendered poem.

The Play Tunnel reviewed by Steve Mannheimer

"The air up there. I would be the first to admit that such vague lyrical folderol may suggest nothing to most folks. My aesthetic love may blind me: Obvious emptiness looks full to me and the very air smells sweeter when it is, after all, just air. Call it an acquired taste--but everyone needs some taste for air. And for those who prefer it a bit more gregarious, there is Gwendolyn's installation. Called The Play Tunnel, it consist of green painted walls, an orange floor, a largish white rectangular block with one black end and a very long blue-fabric tube suspended in midair by guy wires. Perhaps needless to say, the tube stands in sizzling contrast to the walls and floor. The wires, tied to the far wall, give it sort of "speed-line" momentum. So, when the tube terminates against a clear plastic panel inset in the wall of windows at its other end, there is a sense of great movement suddenly, surprisingly stopped.

In this case, the subject seems to be, again, the air, the emptiness, the consciousness of sky drawn into the room, delivered as color, brought to the floor by the visual weight of that block, then recycled up to be exhaled back outside--all in visual metaphor, of course. It is in short, a great magical execu-toy of visual dynamics. It is a twin-cousin to Gwendolyn's last installation (Newton's Cradle), in which almost the very same visual structure embodied a row of bowling balls that did, indeed, swing against each other like an industrial-scale toy. But now Gwendolyn has gone a giant step beyond the merely mechanical. Now, all movement is implied rather than real. She moves the same weight, perhaps even more, aided only by the visual energy provided by a few lines and a burst of color.

And in that she has stepped into illusion, into magic---the heart of art and so much better than machinery."

Newton's Cradle reviewed by Steve Mannheimer

"One large Caveat: Extended viewing may or may not yield definitive readings of this complex arrangement of suspended bowling balls, grass seed, an automatic garage door opener and a medicine cabinet. Viewers are invited to activate the installation by pushing the opener's remote control, setting in motion the last bowling ball in a row of 15, which eventually bumps the next-to-last and thus bounces the one at the opposite end while those in between stay motionless. Meanwhile, a string attached to the first ball slowly draws open a medicine cabinet on a nearby wall, revealing a bowling pin, and a teacup of grass seed.

Masculine commentary? At first glance, there is humor and social commentary: Are not the garage, the bowling balls and grass seed the telltale clues of your basic all-american man-about-the-house? Further: The row of balls may remind some viewers of that classic, mindlessly clicking "execu-toy" or desk ornament popular a few years back. In that, the end balls in a suspended row of chrome ball bearings would swing back and forth alternating as one's momentum was transferred through the stationary row the other end. Is that it? Combined, these two readings translate as a send-up of suburban, white-collar masculinity, a scaled-up interpretation of the vacuousness of their daily and seasonal rituals. This is a plausible reading but not quite enough. Call it the subject but not the content of Skaggs' installation. The mood of the piece, to the extent that this arrangement might be said to have an emotional texture or atmosphere, is rather less scathing and instead more poetic than might be expected. An uncertain delicacy pervades it, a distant dreaminess arising from Skaggs' handling of the hard, heavy and cantankerous as if it were light and soft. Moreover, the cause-and-effect of it all implies some great stretch from the mechanical to the natural, with the muffled music of the spheres hanging in between.

What does it mean? In short, there may be more things in heaven and garages, Horatio, than is dreamt of in our philosophy. Despite the goofy obviousness of the separate elements, the whole machinery eludes any pat explanation. It is a Rube Goberg-ish venture into metaphysics, culminating in a hint of salvation. Skaggs suggests a natural medicine for the mechanical humdrum of American life, the renewal implicit in these seeds of grass. Despite--or perhaps because of--the modesty of its ingredients, this is an almost Whitmanesque vision. In this, Skaggs demonstrates her familiarity with so much of contemporary installation art. Like so much of that, she begins with the well-known and with it builds a metaphoric edifice into the ineffable, into poignant absurdity, into the wistfulness of a world made of mute but ever-present things through which we know most of what we can know.

Implicit in work such as Skaggs' is also the assumption that the world can be known, basically because it is envisioned as a machine and thus, presumably, governed by dependable laws that bodies at rest tend to stay at rest, that every action is followed by equal and opposite reaction--in other words, by Newton's laws of motion."