Cayce Zavaglia: Unseen

Cayce Zavaglia

Unseen

Cayce Zavaglia

Unseen

October 18 – November 27, 2019

William Shearburn Gallery

The Power of the Unseen: Thoughts on the exhibition Unseen created by artist Cayce Zavaglia

By Kim Power There is a whole side of the human persona that remains undetectable to the human eye. No matter how much we reveal to others, there remains a hidden aspect, the very core of our being that is only privy to our own unique psyche. It is woven into a tangled web of identity both real and imagined, imposed and invented.

These days we are facing a whole new range of identity politics, covering cultural backgrounds to gender identity. The question of the day is “Who am I?” and “How do I have agency in identifying who I am?” Not to mention respect. Whether due to social media’s craze for the “selfie” culture or to the inevitable and righteous voices of mistreated and misrepresented factions of our diverse population, fighting for their basic human rights, we are more self-aware, more “woke” than ever before. We have categories upon categories of identification, layers upon layers that enrich and embolden creative self-invention. We all want to stand up and be counted. To matter.

To be seen.

Through the lens of Cayce Zavaglia’s portraits, individuals are given that platform. Their 15 minutes of fame, so to speak. However, it is not the trappings of fame that her artwork embodies but more of a permission to simply exist as who they are, in the moment. No embellishments. No smoothing over of imperfections. They are authentically and steadfastly real and their expressions reflect a conversation with the viewer that is both intimate and familiar. They don’t have to be part of a select crowd, they just have to be human, with their own flaws, their own identity, quietly understated but uniquely celebrated. Zavaglia isn’t looking to ride the wave of identity politics.

Instead, she has only one criteria for her subjects, that they have, in some way, touched her life. Whether they are family or friends, they belong, through a tangle of associations and relationships, within the permeable yet invisible nuclear envelope that constructs the identity of Zavaglia herself.

In the poem, Drop a Pebble in the Water James William Foley writes, “Drop a pebble in the water: just a splash, and it is gone; But there’s half-a-hundred ripples circling on and on and on, Spreading, spreading from the center, flowing on out to the sea. And there is no way of telling where the end is going to be.” Zavaglia is working in concentric circles, like the rings of a tree. She shows her roots, her history, through the threads she lays down. They are woven into the tapestry of her life, played out in rhizomatic connections that lay both above and below ground.

To understand these connections, one need only look back over Zavaglia’s impressive history of exhibitions and achievements. They are the place-markers on a map of her

artistic career which now spans eighteen years. Her artworks are included in collections from the Schoeni Gallery Hong Kong, the prestigious West Collection in Pennsylvania and the The Ria and Lex Daniëls Collection at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, Holland, to name a few. She has produced six solo shows from Miami to St. Louis to New York City. Zavaglia credits her exhibition Recto/Verso at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis (2014) as a pinnacle experience, which spurred her on to exploring more large-scale works and breaking the boundaries of portraiture. Her history of exhibiting with the William Shearburn Gallery began in 2016 with EXPO Chicago and has organically led to this current solo exhibition, Unseen.

We are the cartographers, deciphering the complex topography both visible, and invisible, in her visual language of thread, paint, line, color and shape. First though, it is important to understand that, within the scope of this analysis, there is a broader understanding that an artist is more than the art they produce. Robert Henri, author of The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students Bearing on the Concept and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art (1984) said it best, “Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.” He uniquely comprehended that, “It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.”

Cayce Zavaglia is indeed one of those rare few. She achieved her Master in Fine Arts in painting at Washington University in 1998. Having painted varied interpretations of the genre of portraiture for two years after graduation, Zavaglia became pregnant with her first child, a daughter. Not skipping a beat but wanting to create a non-toxic environment for her child, Zavaglia experimented to find a material which both resonated with her but also allowed her to raise her family. Having stitched as a young child, she hearkened back to that memory and began experimenting with thread as a line of conversation with her past, her present knowledge of form and structure and her new found reality as a caregiver for her family, which today consists of her husband and four children.

Her first works began with thirty colors of crewel embroidery wool sewn onto Belgian linen. Today her palette has grown to include over 200 colors, not all of which she uses in the same piece and includes cotton DMC and silk thread. Zavaglia paints the background of each composition in distressed acrylic colors of cool sherbert—pinks, aqua, lime green—typically in understated chromatic intensity, leaving space for the figure. She begins the process of stitching by making color notes, which build in layers and tonality developing a low relief, interlacing variegated flesh tones which describe the very fabric of which we are all made.

Zavaglia’s technique is not unlike that of the Pointillists of the late 1800’s, who would lay down dots of pure unmixed color to be blended by the viewer’s eye. The Pointillists

were highly influenced by the French chemist, Michel Eugène Chevreul who was hired by the director of the dye plant of Gobelin Tapestry Works in Paris to investigate complaints about their quality of dyes. His discoveries, outlined, in his publication, The Principles of Harmony and the Contrast of Colours and Their Applications to the Arts (1908), describe the optics of visual color mixing that occurs when we view one thread of color laid down next to another, a concept known as simultaneous contrast. Zavaglia uses this illusion to the full capacity of its benefits.

The diversity of her materials has expanded over the course of time. Zavaglia reintroduced paint into her repertoire in 2014, creating a series of small gouache paintings. In 2015 she exhibited a large-scale acrylic painting of her son (Rocco Verso, 89 x 74 in.) at Lyons Wier Gallery in New York, in a solo show entitled About Face. The abstract portrait is based on the Versos, as Zavaglia has termed the reverse side of her embroideries, which she often reveals when showing her photorealistic thread paintings.

The contrast of the two creates a stimulating dialogue between what is seen and what is unseen, the complex and tangled inner workings of our lives and psychological make-up that simulates the highways and by-ways of all the paths that we have taken and those that we have not, turns, twists and knots that are all part of our navigation through this complex reality that we call life.

Branching out from creating works about her nuclear family, Zavaglia followed with another solo exhibition at Lyons Wier Gallery in 2018 entitled Southerly, this time including portraits of childhood friends she made in Australia after her parents moved there from Valparaiso, Indiana in 1972 when she was just one year old. As an expat without access to her relatives beyond her immediate family, these friends became an extension of her familial unit, an experience familiar to many who have lived the life of an immigrant in a foreign country. Zavaglia was able to document her adopted “tribe” due to a generous grant bestowed on her through the award of an Artist Fellowship with the Regional Arts Commission in St Louis in 2014.

The need for belonging, as hypothesized by Roy F. Baumeister and Mark R. Leary is a human drive “to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of lasting, positive and significant interpersonal relationships.” (The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Motivation, Psychological Bulletin, Volume 117, No. 13, 1995) It is fundamental for creating a strong and stable sense of identity. Zavaglia’s portraits are a prime example of the success of that drive and as such portray a larger conceptual portrait of the artist herself. As the poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;—“ (Meditation 17 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624) Several of the embroideries included in Unseen are from the Southerly series of portraits, with an added recent portrait of a young innocent, Emmylou (the artist’s best friend’s daughter in Australia). Inspired by Gerhard Richter’s portrait of his own

daughter, Betty (1988), installed at the St. Louis Art Museum, Zavaglia chose an intimate moment just as the child awakens from the land of nod, her beautiful strands of blond hair echoing the material they are portrayed in. For us, as the audience, we must react to Emmylou and the others as strangers. However, their portrayal, through the eyes of the artist as she gazes at them and they return her gaze, invokes a sense of familiarity. Our emotional intelligence combines with our capacity for facial recognition to “read” that these are faces that look upon us, not as strangers, but as a friends. In this way we share a common dialogue with the artist. We are in conversation with these individuals for whom so much care has been taken to describe not only their facial features in uncanny precision, but also who they are as individuals. In their portrayal we may recognize our selves as regarded by others and our potential for connection and community. We are seen.

Continually broadening her repertoire and visual language, in this current solo exhibition at the Willliam Shearburn Gallery, Zavaglia is treating us to her latest most courageous and physically challenging work. Seen for the first time, a six by seven foot “Verso” entitled Unseen graces the gallery walls and, contrary to its title, once seen it cannot be unseen. Its sheer size demands our full attention. It is iconic in its representation of the human spirit in larger-than-life reality yet at the same time it invokes a sense of the “other” in that though we recognize it as a portrait, it is abstracted from its own identity.

Our primal drive to establish facial recognition is bifurcated. This iconoclastic deconstruction of our own preconceived notions of portraiture is no threat, however.

Meticulously embroidered by hand, obsessively stitched around the clock for over six hours a day in nine months, Zavaglia’s combination of color, squiggles, stops, starts and dangling threads, becomes a maze through which we discover an endless playground of visual stimulation. From afar it reads as the blurred representation of a young woman, braids and all, her face wide as the moon and shining like the sun. She is lit with an inner presence, yet holding an indiscernible expression. From a great distance we approach, wanting to see clearer, to somehow understand what we are witnessing. Who is this person whose presence draws us near? She has no name. Shall we call her Virtue? Or perhaps give her our own moniker. No matter. It is not necessary. How did Romeo put it? “—a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” For what is in a name? Once named, shall she be seen? No, already she is within her own rights a person. Calling her a she is also an assumption. But for the braids and colored lips, we cannot know her gender.

Close up and personal it is revealed that Unseen is a massive sculptural construction whose surface turns us once again into map readers. Through careful and attentive navigation, we discover the trail markers that the artist has laid out for us, virtual breadcrumbs to find our way, or better yet to entice us to dig deeper. Bits of vintage cloth, sequins, ragged strips of paint and hand-made pom-poms lure us in. Pom-poms, an embellishment once signifying high rank in the Napoleonic army given agency once

again in the Great Depression when scarcity of materials gave rise to innovation with scraps of leftover yarn and here, once again elevated to iconic status.

Through this web of visible and invisible connections, Cayce Zavaglia leads us to a deeper sense of communication with the self, an acceptance of who we are both on the surface and in the depths of our entanglements. She shows the beauty of both realities with authentic disclosure of the human spirit.

Kim Power is a painter, writer, curator and teacher living in New York City. She has exhibited since 2002 in solo and group shows throughout the U.S., France and The Netherlands. A graduate of the New York Academy of Art (2014), Power has written for The Brooklyn Rail, ARTPULSE magazine, Art Aesthetics magazine and the blogs ArteFuse, The Blue Review, Surface Design Association Blog and Quantum Art Review. Power has curated and cocurated a number of successful exhibitions, including Natural Proclivities at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center (Borough of Manhattan Community College) and Representing: Selected Works from Alumni and Faculty of the New York Academy of Art at Artisan Lofts at Artisan Lofts in Tribeca in New York City.

Unseen, 2019 Hand wool embroidery, acrylic paint, pom poms and sequins on raw Belgian linen 84 x 72 inches

Emmylou, 2019 Hand embroidery: Crewel wool on Belgian linen with acrylic background 29 x 28 inches

Emmy Lou (detail)

Emmy Lou (detail verso)

Roland, 2018 Hand embroidery: Crewel wool on Belgian linen with acrylic background 15 x 24 1/4 inches

Roland (detail)

Hudson, 2017 Hand embroidery: Crewel wool on Belgian linen with acrylic background 14 1/4 x 12 inches

Hudson (detail)

Hudson (detail verso)

Orlando, 2018 Hand embroidery: Crewel wool on Belgian linen with acrylic background 23 1/4 x 20 3/4 inches

Orlando (detail)

Tennyson, 2018 Hand embroidery: Crewel wool on Belgian linen with acrylic background 23 1/4 x 20 3/4 inches

Sandra, 2018 Hand embroidery: Crewel wool on Belgian linen with acrylic background 15 1/2 x 24 1/4 inches

Sandra (detail)

Sandra (detail verso)

Jackson, 2017 Hand embroidery: Crewel wool on Belgian linen with acrylic background 14 1/4 x 12 inches

Jackson (detail)

Julie, 2018 Hand embroidery: Crewel wool on Belgian linen with acrylic background 18 1/2 x 17 1/4 inches

Julie (detail)

Julie (detail verso)

Bruce, 2018 Hand embroidery: Crewel wool on Belgian linen with acrylic background 14 3/4 x 12 inches

Artist Statement

I was originally trained as a painter, but switched to embroidery 18 years ago in an attempt to establish a non-toxic studio and create a body of work that referenced an embroidered piece I had made as a child growing up in Australia. My work focuses exclusively on the portraits of friends, family, and fellow artists. The gaze of the portrait toward the viewer has remained constant over the years and in my work...as has my search for a narrative based on both faces and facture. The work is all hand sewn using cotton and silk thread or crewel embroidery wool. From a distance they read as hyperrealistic paintings, and only after closer inspection does the work’s true construction reveal itself.

Over the years, I have developed a sewing technique that allows me to blend colors and establish tonalities that resemble the techniques used in classical oil painting. The direction in which the threads are sewn mimic the way brush marks are layered within a painting which, in turn, allows for the allusion of depth, volume, and form. My stitching methodology borders on the obsessive, but ultimately allows me to visually evoke painterly renditions of flesh, hair, and cloth.

A few years ago, I turned one of my embroideries over and for the first time saw the possibilities of a new image and path for my work that had been with me in the studio for so long but had gone unnoticed. It was the presence of another portrait that visibly was so different from the meticulously sewn front image…but perhaps more psychologically profound. The haphazard beauty found in this verso image created a haunting contrast to the front image and was a world of loose ends, knots, and chaos that could easily translate into the world of paint.

This discovery led to a “return to paint” in my work and the production of a series of intimate gouache and large format acrylic paintings of these verso images. Highlighting the reverse side of my embroideries, which historically and traditionally has been hidden from the viewer, has initiated a conversation about the divergence between our presented and private selves. The production of both Recto and Verso images is now the primary focus of my studio work.

-Cayce Zavaglia

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cayce Zavaglia Unseen October 18 – November 27, 2019 William Shearburn Gallery 665 S Skinker Blvd St. Louis, MO 63105 314.367.8020 www.shearburngallery.com