Berkshire Artist Linda Mieko Allen Solos in Soho
'Territories' at Nancy Hoffman Gallery,
By: Jane Hudson - Dec 09, 2006
Linda Mieko Allen
Territories
Nancy Hoffman Gallery
429 West Broadway, New York
December 2, 2006 - January 4, 2007
I met with Linda Allen in her loft in the Eclipse Mill in North Adams, MA to discuss the opening of her show at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in Soho. She had just returned from the City, and was full of reactions to the opening and to work she saw while there.
"It was a fabulous opening. I wasn't nervous at all." In comparison to her first show in the gallery (2004), she was pleased this time with the numbers of people who knew of her work and came to see her latest production. Her dealer, Nancy Hoffman, hung the show carefully curating the groupings of works to emphasize themes and balance scale. "Nancy is a great person, a wonderful soul", she reflected.
While she was staying in New York on Central Park West as a guest of Hoffman, Linda visited the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Natural History. Bill Viola's 'Out of Time' video installation, Brice Marden's drawings, and Manet's 'Execution of Maximillian' all at the Modern were particular favorites. In addition, Kiki Smith's retrospective at the Whitney she felt was notable for its 'humanity'.
We came to focus on the paintings which are now out of the studio, and so to be discussed as memories and reproductions. The artist was quick to point out how unsatisfactory the promotional images of her work are. For what one misses in these is the depth, the receding layers, the incidents of organic surface, nuanced color and gesture that are so important to the experience of this work. She demurred when I characterized the work as formal, instead defining her purpose as conceptually driven, metaphorically rich and technically rigorous. Especially in this body of work entitled 'Territories', she investigates issues of "boundaries, transitions and transformation and also addresses the relationship of the psychological and physical properties of those boundaries, places and balance."
There is a precipitous energy to the images Allen conjures. Whether there are isolated figures perched upon floating islands, or craggy fissures revealing substrata, the places are chthonic, balkanized, not-quite-congealed, and barely habitable. At the same time these 'scapes' are constructed with obsessive attention to the cumulative power of the materials. Built on maple panels that float off the wall, Allen applies marble dust and graphite embedded in a polymer medium, overlayed with beeswax, she sands each layer to an almost hermetic smoothness while leaving areas for inlaid photographic or drawn imagery. The result is an organically rich, geometrically complex constructed reality, where time and place are disturbed, and incidental energies erupt (in red) and then retreat as others emerge. "I am…interested in the dynamics of isolation of objects in a situational grouping, a kind of aloneness or separation in the larger scheme of things. These works are systems of space, time and possibility." A visitor to her exhibition noted, "You're bending time."
Allen came to this work in large part as a result of her move to the Berkshires. Having grown up outside of Boston, and attended U.Mass Amherst as well as the Rhode Island School of Design, she was familiar with East Coast sensibilities, but longed for an environment that was more sympathetic to her Asian-American mixed identity. San Francisco offered her that comfort zone, as well as a launching pad for her career. At the same time she did not find a sense of 'home' there after twelve years, and returned to Massachusetts where, in 2004, she purchased a loft in the newly developed Eclipse Mill in North Adams.
Her process has always involved some form of marble dust, and when she came to the Berkshires, she made contact with Specialty Minerals, a large limestone mine in Adams. This facility is one of many owned by the corporation, and when Allen approached the headquarters in New York City, they granted her a perpetual supply of their product. Interestingly enough, some might say tragically, the mining operation has gouged a huge crater into the mountainside from which it takes its materials. This image as well as the act of excavation have had a profound effect on the visual and conceptual strategies employed by this artist in her recent work. There are the dangling outcroppings, the elegant and stark interior strata, the porous walls and powdered remnants. It's all here!
Finally, Linda Allen's odyssey has achieved its denoument here in a city that is experiencing its own evolution, changes brought about by tectonic socio-economic forces that flow through its foundations like the ubiquitous Hoosic River. She like others in the 'creative economy' of the area is hoping to participate in the revitalization that is coming none too soon. The need to belong, to find a home is a universal desire, and as one of the new 'immigrants', this artist is finding her profound truths in the primal materials of this environment. It is hoped that the regional culture will find ways to embrace her vision and encourage her to thrive.
For further information on this exhibition visit: http://www.nancyhoffmangallery.com