2 weeks Ago By By Mary Gow Arts Correspondent
All families are complicated. Invisible bonds, emotional history, and genetics contribute in shaping identity in biological and chosen families. And they are constantly changing.
Susan Smereka’s exhibition, “Coagulate” at Axel’s Gallery in Waterbury explores family dynamics, identity and emotional inheritance. Fragmented materials — cut up mono-prints, photographs, fabric, letters, wood veneer and much more — are stitched together in Smereka’s multi-layered compositions. “I love being around Susan’s artwork.
It feels so delicate and balanced and so complex at the same time. Like my family,” said Whitney Aldrich, Axel’s Gallery and Frame Shop owner. Deep exploration of family is a longtime focus of Smereka’s work.
Along with considering changing relationships, she delves into genetic inheritance. “Our identities are shaped not only by the present but also by our ancestors, their struggles, and histories. Each of my works explores how family can be built, torn apart, and remade,” says Smereka in her artist’s statement.
Throughout “Coagulate” viewers see Smereka’s recurring motif of a quarter-almond shape. That particular shape has been in her work for several years, but about three years ago, it really resonated. “I saw it a part of a whole, a quarter of a whole — sort of a fundamental human way of being.
We’re always looking for connections,” she said. “When two humans are relating, they create half of an almond. And then with other people in their family they create a whole almond.
But when I see the whole thing, it is not a perfect shape,” she said. “The shapes, in different sizes and materials, interact — they overlay, sometimes nearly obscure each other, sometimes align like blades of grass, sometimes crowd together. Viewers may read tension, tranquility, cooperation and more in their juxtapositions and compositions they form together.
The almond shape may bring to mind the mandorla, an almond shaped frame seen around a holy individual in some religious iconography. It is the shape created by overlap of two circles — in that religious context, the overlap between spheres of heaven and Earth. The fragmented materials in Smereka’s pieces have their own histories — genealogies of a sort.
She extensively uses cut up monoprints and other pieces of her work, also all kinds of personal ephemera. Their past is thus embedded in her new work. Close viewing of her pieces reveals some of this ancestry.
She brings them together, she notes, “messily and imperfectly, but always looking for the intrinsic beauty in the ‘dysfunction.’ I transform family letters, photographs, templates, and other studio material in hopes of transcending and perhaps healing unconscious trauma and negative patterns,” Smereka says. Smereka’s stitching is among her pieces’ interconnected layers.
Lines of machine stitching run through them — grid-like, meandering, binding pieces or pieces of pieces together. Like families, the threads also have plenty of loose ends and loops. The exhibition’s title “Coagulate,” Smereka explained, “came to me for this show and compelled me to focus more on how family is not just a biological construct, but a network of bonds formed by friends and colleagues.
” “Coagulate is one of those words that keeps on unfolding in what it means and how it works with the body of the work. Blood is often referred to as family. In light of what is happening in the United States right now, it is a word that is an action, as well,” she said.
In her process, Smereka often starts with her flat files of earlier work, and chooses work that she has shelved or that is not yet complete and returns to further develop it or cut and sew it into a new piece. “There is a lot of building up of material before I start making work ..
. I get a lot of information from looking at pieces. As I’m working, I may resonate with a certain color.
It goes back and forth between building up material to work with and starting to sew it down. And at some point, I’m making artwork,” she said. In Smereka’s “appeared” quarter almonds of monoprints, in colors around mustard green, combine to almost float through across the paper.
Look closely to see the print and pieces of each one, the stitching that binds their individual patchwork together, and other layers of stitching making connections between them. In “sudden,” three tiers of book pages align, each exposed page segment perforated from the binding stitching that once united them. Now sewn shut, a viewer cannot get a glimpse of the text that is surely on the other side.
Just the thinnest slivers of the curve of those quarter almonds peak out, the bright colors perhaps evoking tiny flashes of hope. [email protected].
