Notes on Nora Shields: the context of between. Lia Trinka-Browner. 2016.
These are objects between countering ideas, doubling-down on both soft and hard materials, involved with and between both parties of painting and sculpture. They are attached to design (I’m thinking about my couch, my wardrobe, my wallpaper) and abstraction (I’m thinking about various shapes and movement that resonate as complicated, but also smoothly executed). These structures are painted, constructed sculptures but more than that: designed, patterned, delicate and loose at the same time.
We live with so many objects around us at all times and most people probably spend too much time living with the wrong objects. Sometimes, to psychological detriment, people continue to live with wrong wallpaper and wonder why they are so angry.
These works are between in-ward and out-side.
Colors, colors, colors, black and white, colors and pattern, pattern, pattern and metal, armature, hanging threads - Fringe! The term “flapper” either came from a description of a bird flapping its wings while learning to fly or some earlier British slang for a young prostitute.
I'd be remiss not to mention a gendered read of Nora Shield’s work: This is not necessarily about the artist as female. Because that’s just how it is - she’s female. But give us folds and give us pattern and soft fabric, then somehow the work is seen as speaking with a women’s voice. I can think of a lot of men who make work that also fucks with the same ideas, but whatever.
Certain activities refer to the historical idea of “woman's work,” sewing, crafting, cooking and gardening. To that end, women’s work can be interesting and amazing. Men do women’s work too. Pleats are a reminder of some hidden secret. It’s good to play with these feminine ideas: fans, fascinators, and fabric…and then and marry them to materials that are considered primarily masculine: metal, rivets, armature.
Cognitive Consonance: Some are sconce-like and protrude from the walls like cosmological universes, mixed in with haphazard houndstooth arrangements and color that is carefully, beautifully placed, specifically arranged and harmoniously considered.
Between the soft high thread-count sheets and the hard edge.
Pattern names (because language is a part of this too): Anthemion, Argyle, Art Nouveau, Block Printing, Botanical, Brocatelle, Calico, Camouflage, Chequer, Chevron, Diaper, Dog’s tooth, Egg and Dart, Floral, Fret Pattern, Gingham, Herringbone, Madras, Moiré, Ombre, Pinstripe, Polka Dots, Stripes, Tartan, Tattersall, Toile de Jouy, Trefoil.
Transport me from Cabaret Voltaire to Lee Bontecou to the specific landscape of Los Angeles Art in the past 20 years to The Best 32 Hats at the Royal Ascot!
Stripes are used in barricades and caution signs, jailhouse costumes and flags. Historically, they were used in dazzle camouflage, a somewhat unsuccessful plan to paint WW1 U-boats and troopships. The stripes were mainly black and white and diagonal, turning the ships into painted art barges. They were not necessarily meant to conceal or camouflage, but to confuse enemies…and that didn’t really work well, at least for the war effort, but anyone who knows them loves them!
By using the corner of the room, making that extension (kind of like how a restaurant or bar will put up wall to wall mirrors to make the space just feel larger) the place just opens right up (it really ties the room together) continuing, and making it fold outside of itself.
Between specificity and ambiguity.
Let’s think of these works as conceptually stretching into space, architecture coming off the wall, into our heads and wrapping around the physical space. It’s pleasing. It’s in stereo and then surround-sound because maybe finding a center is not the goal here. We have to navigate what’s in-between and behind the scenes. We’re looking to find the storyline and pathway into maneuvering between all those various metal welds and support systems, colors, and pleasingly junky, shrewd gestures.
Lia Trinka-Browner
2016
Pretty Raw. Trinie Dalton. 2018.
A fleeting sunset thought that stuck: admiring dueling battles between Costa’s hummingbirds fighting at my row of backyard feeders, I wondered if (with added sugar water reservoirs) Nora Shields’ metal sculptures would attract my favorite tiny vicious pollinators. Hummingbird feeder design is a regular preoccupation of mine, as are pistilstamen compositions that invite either single or multiple birds into their folds, crevices, and color contours, much like Shields’ creations, which transform sheet metal, wire, cardboard, and rivet into biomorphic collisions occupying space between orchid blossoms, fancy tailored dresses, and aerospace industry wreckage smeared with nail polish and lipstick. Like robotic femmes fatales or erratic boulders, her forms both hide and highlight their razor-sharp edges: birds would get beheaded, de-winged, and otherwise amputated as they tried to find ways into Shields’ dangerous, alluring labyrinths! With that peril in mind, the daydream shifted to how pairing her three sculptures with Adam Miller’s three new large-scale “quilt pieces”—drawings that feature grids of rough, speedy, no-regret pencil slashes—feels like an exciting noncompetitive knife-fight…Picture a knife-fight that’s more like a dance-floor battle in which everyone showcased is a winner. There’s something even more ferociously enticing in the vision of this two-person exhibition weathering Pat Hill’s wintry, intimate Michigan garage (as a Left Field project); these colorful artworks will cook the space with their complementary hues underscored by hot magentas and fiery reds. Though Miller works in two dimensions and Shields in three, both artists are interested in how textile patterning creates visual impact and velocity, and how much depth of space can be packed into a single surface. Miller has manifested this interest by, in past bodies of work, transferring his drawings to silkscreen, which embeds in his imagistic processing silkscreen’s “insistence of superflat layers that slow down,” as he said in studio visit, his “OCD-like compulsion to draw.” While these new works exist as drawings only, they’re made on rolls of printmaking paper; though because creamy Prismacolor pencil lines are embossed tangibly into cottony paper-stock, they also move towards painting. Adam noticed in generating his new designs that they became “more painterly as [he added] more color and symbol.” Perspective is created, here, through alternation between colors that increase dimension (orange-red; turquoise), and ebony on white, which flattens the surface and makes the more densely colored areas pop. Shields, like Miller, creates visual velocity and compositional depth through color as well as through patterning, often channeling stripes or polkadots, for example, into otherwise solid colored, planar disks, fans, and curls of surface. She is fascinated by bas relief’s ability to, as she said in studio visit, “move into space but to deal in pictures.” Just as Miller’s drawings become more architectural through their accrual of geometric forms, Shields’ sculptures, as small architectural feats, invite one to guess at armature and sequence of assembly. When asked about her process, which involves ripping, tearing, cutting, balancing, draping, folding, and riveting that all feels fast and intuitive, yet highly engineered for fortification—the sculptures appear well-built as if they’d survive being hurled across a room—Shields called it a balance between “style decisions” and making sure works “move away from the figurative.” Her works hinge on contrast. For example, pieces often start with binder-clipped corrugated cardboard, until steel and aluminum sheet metal gradually moves in; cardboard may stay or go, and welding might take place. Then spray paint, fabric, and other surfaces are added. Spray paint is sometimes then sanded off, to strike rapport between rough and smooth, dirty and clean, and to produce a level of finish that maintains tactile dynamism. The procedural layering, as well as equal attention paid to corners, seams, and inner-pockets, gives the sculptures theatrical, decorative sensation, and like interior or costume design, invoke dramatic friezes that, upon closer inspection, are comprised of unexpected moments. That’s why although Nora consciously tributes Pattern & Decoration-movement artists like Kim McConnell, Paul Kushner, and Daniel Buren, her work feels much more humanistic and handmade; her metalworks are oddly akin to ceramic sculptures, full of fingerprint and charisma despite initial sheen. Adam Miller approaches the decorative differently, though with equal bold tribute. With his graphic design background and interest in DIY histories of music show posters, horror and sci-fi film schwag, and comic book kitsch, Miller seeks a “rawness,” as he called it, that he’s admired in Xerox zine-quality, prints that are off-register, and other happily machined, procedural mistakes that are hard to achieve with a more precious approach to brush on canvas. Miller’s employment of symbolic forms, which resemble specific cultural identifiers (Asian; Pre-Columbian) although they are elusively generalized and archetypal, use patterning as psychological metaphor: abjection and transgression are key themes in his symbolism, thus his love of drawing faces and masks. That said, what could be called “primitivist” in his work is not so much about cultural signification as instinctual mark making; think H.R. Penck’s reactive gestures, amongst Miller’s favorite. Stacked chevrons, scallops, arrows, and points, his essential imaging belies ruminations about such human issues as life/death cycles, creation and birth tales, and his subcultural desire to “create our own icons,” which also tracks back to his love of punk collage aesthetics. Shown together, a deep interest in material’s potential to be transformed becomes an obvious throughway between these two artists. Their usages of patterning and their celebrations of the decorative, although divergent thematically, are evident common threads. And, how both of these bodies of work begin with simple armatures—whether in wire or pencil—then accumulate energy also invites comparison. While there are many ways to visually access this longstanding, specific artistic friendship, it remains, more generally, a fascinating example of how similarities can arise through noticing what appear to be stark differences.