THE UNTANGLING Susan White’s solo exhibition 01.22.21 / 03.06.21
Studios Inc Studios Inc provides studio space, professional development, networking, and exhibitions for mid-career artists in Greater Kansas City. We engage the Kansas City community through our Exhibition Series Program, which exhibits resident artist works throughout the year, free to the public
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THE UNTANGLING
Artist Statement
After a three-year residency at Studios, Inc. each artist is given the opportunity to mount a solo exhibition in the 4500 sq ft exhibition hall. It is a thrilling and daunting challenge.
I began thinking about how I would envision the space, and what I was going to address in my work at least a year before the exhibition was to open in January 2021. I made a scale model of the exhibition hall and began to live with it in my studio over the months. I gathered research into artists whose work I admired and began to think about ways in which their work influenced my thinking, among them, the ceramist, Edmund de Waal and the painter, Sam Gilliam. I gathered parts of objects, partial projects, miscellaneous drawings and ideas that had accumulated in my studio and in my head over the time that I had been in my generous studio, pulling things together and seeking synergy and a cohesive direction. By early spring of 2020 I had a plan against which I was ready to execute. Or so I thought.
And then things fell apart. The pandemic arrived along with massive unemployment, the death of George Floyd and the ensuing demonstrations and protests across the country. Schools closed, homelessness and evictions skyrocketed and unparalleled death and disease overtook the nation and the world. On top of it all, the most venomous political environment in decades leading up to the November elections wracked the country. Did I mention climate change? Forest fires sweeping the land, floods and droughts, freezing weather and vast power outages.
How could I execute against what I had envisioned to be a somewhat understandable plan regarding my work in this significant exhibition in the midst of all of this mayhem? All of this trauma? All of the civil and personal upheaval stemming from this marinade of angst, fear and anger that characterized seemingly every day of 2020. Waking up in the morning thinking, I can’t believe we’re in this state. In the middle of the night awakening to the idea that, this is America? This is how our democracy works, or doesn’t? Going to bed every night with a kind of weight embedded in my body. I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that almost everyone, if not everyone, in the country experienced 2020 in some manner similar to what I described above.
Throughout the year I was still able to work alone in my spacious studio. But I felt rather paralyzed trying to figure out what to do. I ordered the blackest matte black acrylic paint from an art store in England that makes it available to anyone who is not Anish Kapoor. I am not Anish Kapoor, so I got several bottles. I pulled out my Sumi Ink and graphite and charcoal and walnut ink, most of the darkest media I could work with, and they became the tools I used to try to make sense of the world of 2020.
I came to understand that working with so much black, so much darkness was a way of pushing back against the cacophony of the world. In much the same way that black absorbs the light, my interest in working with such dark media was an effort to absorb and subsume the trauma, the angst, the terrible cultural and emotional noise that permeated the days. It was a way in which I could take all of this in and condense it, distill it, control it so that I could keep from drowning in worry and concern.
I planned from the beginning to include a long thin gold thorn piece, but it wasn’t until the last few weeks that I realized that this piece would be called The Hope Line. I understood the critical place of hope in the midst of this terrible time.
In a similar way, Meditation Field evolved. On the model I had conceived of a large wall drawing and I created a version on my studio wall. It wasn’t until I installed the piece in the exhibition hall that I understood it as a field of meditation, a place of quiet thoughtfulness, in contrast to the tumult embodied by the American flag at the other end of the room.
As I originally conceived of the exhibition, I had not planned to install the American flag. It was slated to be shown in Chicago in the fall of 2020. That opportunity was canceled as the pandemic progressed. As late as the fall I still hadn’t determined to show the flag as part of this exhibition because it carried so much weight, I wasn’t sure how it would incorporate into the whole.
It soon became apparent there was no choice.
The increasingly dangerous and turbulent times demanded that this work, Flag V, be shown.
It was only after the exhibition was finally installed that I came to understand that all of these works together are a response to the time that we have been living through. They represent an effort to come to grips with where we have been and to consider where we are going.
Thus, the title, The Untangling.
Susan White’s The Untangling
By Anne Gatschet
Since she entered the practice of sculpture in the late 1990’s, Susan White has continually quieted the art of building space. In her subtle and methodical work, she is especially attracted to the precise moments of transforming materials and to the processes that join them. In the quiet study of each point of material contact, her primary mentor is nature. Formally comparing her own spacebuilding to structures in the wild, White studies the vulnerabilities, defenses, and risks inherent in making and taking space. Her artwork has gained recognition for its use of the dagger-like thorns of honey locust trees. White describes herself as a person motivated by the experience of fear, and aware of the spatial-material expression of risk and exposure. In her artistic practice, she has inquired continually about these topics and their relation to comfort and sanctuary. Transforming the material of thorns, she deepens our perception of their form, inviting us into quiet points of mystery. Each thorn’s strong, elegantly smooth line diminishes toward its own vanishing point, a place at the edge of invisibility that coincides both with the viewer’s sense of danger and the locust tree’s self-protection. Connecting thorns, White moves from sculpture to scripture with their form, drawing in space with attention to nature’s genius and to the slow precision of the human eye. Her practice, which she describes as meditative, often involves burning holes into thorns with the pencil point tip of a wood burning tool that mirrors the shape of the thorn. In pyrographic drawings, she burns consecutive points on paper while a thin column of smoke rises. This patient labor honors the minutiae of each material transformation in every work, and, while the assemblages and drawings she makes suggest wilderness, they are places of overall quiet and profound formal integrity. The final year of White’s three-year residency at Studios Inc was 2020, and her solo show was born during the height of the 2020 crises in ecosystems, politics, and public health and safety. As she began to bring recent artworks into the expansive exhibition hall, White came to understand that her quiet, solitary practice had taken in and responded to the weight of last year’s monumental and clamorous struggles. She saw that this installation would describe the anguish it had absorbed and offer a space from which to push back against violence and morbidity. It would mark The Untangling of our collective ordeal. Like the year 2020, Susan White’s complicated assemblages look forbidding; but once we acknowledge their danger, we are drawn to the relationships involved in them and might ask just how we ourselves are joined in such difficult, tangled existence.
At an early point in her studio practice, White began to notice that her interest in the pointed tips of sculptural tools coalesced with a fascination for the honey locust thorn. The tree covers itself with sharp, strong points that reminded her of the point of transformation she saw when she burned small holes in wood with a copper-tipped tool. The thorn’s delicacy, quiet, and strength are still fundamental in her practice. These concerns place her work in a unique relation to an artistic discipline usually associated with volume, mass, and plane. She asserts, “Within sculpture, I think in a quiet way of building.” Minute attention transcends this exhibition, which comprises works built from locust branches and from natural and bronzecast thorns; a pyrographic drawing of hundreds of delicate burn points on paper; and two series of paintings that represent the airy labyrinths of her sculptures. In her practice, White focuses on the formal significance of the point: the precise site of material joining; the sharp nibs of her studio tools; and the exact moment in time when materials meet and transform one another. Throughout the works of The Untangling, we sense her meditative focus on points of contact, exaggerated by open or “negative” space around each. To construct her quietly intriguing spaces, White burns holes in multiple thorns, then uses triangulation and tension to insert the thorns into one another, forming a segment of three or four. She uses the segments to interlock with one another. The resulting assemblages draw attention to the precarity of what connects. A remarkable, aesthetic passage takes place when this formal ground encounters cultural and psychological realities. The thorns carry strong associations in the memories of viewers. For many North Americans, they recall encounters with honey locust trees in the wild. No one plants a honey locust on purpose, but throughout this region we often encounter them and find ourselves watching cautiously, as when we meet wasps or snakes. Unlike animals, though, the trees stand still, inviting our eyes to study their elegant weapons. What happens to that remembered encounter with a difficult, dangerous living body, when the memory is brought into a cultural, social, or political context? White extends the meditative effect of her sculpted spaces by merging them with cultural imagery. The immediacy of the point gives way to the figurative force of line as recognizable shapes emerge. The locust thorn itself is a line interrupted by the sharp points of smaller, emerging thorns, and throughout The Untangling we sense the dramatic tension between line and point, between weighty contour and delicate juncture.
Lure (2020) is a painted, bronze cast of numerous thorns that draws us to interpret their unique formal possibility. When locust thorns reach a certain maturity, new thorns emerge along their tapering length. Not unlike a letter in script, their basic line becomes the supporting structure of a system of lines and points. For Lure, White has linked such segments to form a nine-inch high, five-foot long line that evokes a line of writing. Its dynamism looks like a single, brave verse of poetry hanging on the wall’s white page, each jagged thorn evoking the strokes of a written letter. If and when the viewer realizes that Lure’s length of thorns is made of bronze, her awareness increases of the work’s cultural distance from so called “nature” — the world where trees make artful systems of defense regardless of human interference. The associative oscillation between the product of human artwork and that of nature is refined in this piece and lures the viewer into the expressiveness of each unique barb. Here, as with all the sculptures in The Untangling, shadows cast by thorns join other materials as formal elements. Like poetic rhyme, the shadows provide tonal repetitions of principal forms. Taking the visual signs all together, we are drawn into both the art and nature of danger, where we pause to interpret a bold expression of precarity and survival. The Hope Line II is a fifteen-foot, cascading strand of goldpainted thorns, suspended from high in the gallery. Its fall evokes liquidity, and yet, one feels how strongly the spikey materials assert their rigid form in diverse directions. It is remarkable how clearly this symbol echoes the collective experience of hope we felt in 2020: a slender but glowing presence in the room: fragile, risky, and resolute. The precarity of the point and the meanings of the jagged line remain present in White’s treatment of sculptural volume. This exhibition contains the fifth of the artist’s American flags built from honey locust thorns. These largescale flags – this one, seven by thirteen feet — provide a voluminous third dimension to the flat shape of a banner. They are deep visual tangles, offering room for us to look into the political symbol that we are so often asked to look at. On the floor under the bottom edge of White’s Flag V, 2021, lie fragments of red and white stripes, suggesting that a delicate and dangerous body has broken under its own weight. The space she builds from formal meditation on the thorn has evolved into a motif that White places in a range of contexts. Recontextualizing the thorn sculpture’s form, she can shift her work conceptually from the human rapport with ecology, to the fragility of cultural images, or to the emotional content of social and political structures.
The Untangling displays two series of two- dimensional works on paper and matboard. These dark images are less associative with nature and culture, but continue to explore the mood of our times. Seven Tone Poems, each 22 1/2 x 12 inches, in ink and acrylic on paper, occupy a wall of the exhibition with black and grey hues whose density calls for silence. In each poem, the artist remembers the form of her largescale, white-painted thorn sculpture called Rift (2018), which now hangs in a private home. The Tone Poems each represent Rift as an ephemeral presence within vast darkness. Emotionally, they offer a quiet opening and vitality within the dark realities of the year 2020. With matt black acrylic and Sumi ink, White created a ground she calls a “velvet silence,” a protected space within darkness. She scored it with sandpaper and burning tools to suggest the deep, dynamic complexity of Rift. With the small-scale studies of her Tone Poems, White prepared to paint the larger works on matboard that comprise The Fugue Suite. In these fugues, however, Rift’s white lines are more raw and less protected by their black ground than in the Tone Poems. The fugues express exposure to danger, and even pain. Throughout the The Fugue Suite, oil paint and other media, combined with ongoing experiments in scoring, appear in quick, crisscrossed gestures. White’s sculptural motif takes on more personal expressivity in this new, painterly territory. While the fugues reiterate the airy space of Rift, they also describe the angst the artist felt around her as a chaotic public environment imposed itself on individual life. The Untangling, like the year in which it was made, takes us from moments of solitary meditation to a grappling with collective shock. The exhibition carries the viewer through Susan White’s formal journey as a sculptor, from point to line to volume, and then beyond sculpture, to mark making. Throughout, she seems to bring with her an intelligence she learned from the honey locust’s dangerous, strong, and delicate thorn. White carries this natural form through a range of artistic media, and wherever she takes it, it offers her a quiet way of building.
p. 18-19
Installation View The Fugue Suite I-VI 2020
Rift II 2018
p. 2-3
The Untangling 2021
Installation view
Solo Exhibition at Studios, Inc.
p. 20
Fugue Suite I & II 2020
Mixed media on archival matboard mounted on Dibond
72” x 24 “
p. 6
Flag V 2021
Painted honey locust thorns, unique steel links, shadow
132” x 84” x 24”
p. 21
Fugue Suite III 2020
Mixed media on archival matboard mounted on Dibond
72” x 24 “
p. 9
The Hope Line II 2021
Painted honey locust thorns
180” x 9” x 6”
p. 22
Fugue Suite IV & V 2020
Mixed media on archival matboard mounted on Dibond
72” x 24 “
p. 11
The Hope Line 2018 -2020
Work on paper
Pyrograph
49 ¼” x 35 ½”
The Hope Line II (detail) 2021
Painted honey locust thorns
180” x 9” x 6”
p. 13
The Hope Line II 2021
Painted honey locust thorns
180” x 9” x 6”
The Hope Line 2018 -2020
Work on paper
Pyrograph
49 ¼” x 35 ½”
p. 14
The Hope Line 2018 -2020
Work on paper
Pyrograph
49 ¼” x 35 ½”
p. 15
Ibid. (detail)
p. 16-17
Installation View
The Hope Line 2018-2020
Tone Poems I-VIII 2020
Meditation Field 2021
p. 23
Fugue Suite VI 2020
Mixed media on archival matboard mounted on Dibond
72” x 24 “
p. 24-25
Installation View
Lure 2020
Flag V 2021
The Hope Line II 2021
p. 26
Lure 2020
Bronze, oil paint, shadow
9” x 50 ½” x 5”
p. 27
Ibid. (Detail)
p. 29
Flag V 2021
Painted honey locust thorns, unique steel links, shadow
132” x 84” x 24”
Inside back cover
Portrait of the artist Photography by E.G. Schempf
Index of artworks
p. 1
Meditation Field (detail) 2021
Honey locust thorns, acrylic and sumi ink, shadow
144” x 180” x 14”
Susan White Susan White works with thorns from the honey locust tree to create discrete sculptures and large scale installations. She also makes pyrographs, burn drawings influenced by the burning of the prairie in the spring, a kind of fertility ritual that restores nitrogen to the soil.
Much of White’s work evokes a sense of stillness, of quietness. Through the use of organic materials and processes she explores the elemental relationship of the body to the landscape, the cellular nature of the body/the granular nature of the soil, the sense of time and space in the natural world.
Susan White has been an adjunct professor at the Kansas City Art Institute as well as at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She’s earned a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and a BA from Drury University. Her work has been supported by multiple Inspiration Grants from ArtsKC and artist grants from the Nerman Museum, the Daum Museum and the Salina Art Center, the Avenue of the Arts Foundation and the Creative Capital Foundation for a Professional Development Workshop. An international travel grant from the Lighton International Artist Exchange Program supported her artist residency at Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo. White exhibited a thorn installation, Flag IV, in an exhibition in Como, Italy in 2019, with support from ArtsKC.
Studios Inc’s three-year residency program provides a unique immersion experience that allows mid-career artists to use their studio space to conceptualize, produce, and exhibit their work.
Studios Inc serves the Kansas City Community and Crossroads Arts District by offering a free, open-to-thepublic exhibition series throughout the year, which includes opening receptions, First Friday receptions, artist talks, regular gallery hours, as well as scheduled tours and events. It is our hope to showcase and promote high-quality, interesting artwork to both visitors and members of the Kansas City community.
Courtney Wasson, Executive Director
courtney@thestudiosinc.org
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