|
Pretexts and Subtexts:
Sandy Winters, (catalogue) essay, Eleanor Heartney
Recording the Universe
By Eleanor Heartney
From Frankenstein to the Matrix, popular and serious culture is full
of warning tales about the dangers embodied by unbridled reliance on
technology. Created by man, technology assumes a life of its own in
these narratives, evolving into an empowered servant which has the potential
to overwhelm its master.
One such parable is the story of the Sorcerer's apprentice, so memorably
enacted by a beleaguered Mickey Mouse in the Disney Classic Fantasia.
In this animated cartoon, apprentice magician Mickey has been instructed
to mop the floor. When his master departs, Mickey casts a spell on the
mop and bucket to do the job themselves. Alas, this scheme is too successful
as they splinters into hundreds of clones who relentlessly splash water
on the floor until the whole castle is in danger of flooding. Order
is only restored with the return of the master magician, who retracts
Mickey's spell and returns the legions of mops and buckets back to their
original singular state.
I couldn't help thinking of this story when I viewed a partial installation
of Sandy Winters' Pretexts and Subtexts in her studio last winter. Wrapping
around the walls like uncontrolled eruptions of ivy or kudzu, drawings
of cartoonish plant and machine hybrids exuded a similar sense of blind,
unreasoning force - like Mickey's mops, they were at once humorous and
unsettling in their adherence to imperatives beyond human control.
Winters has created an almost feral art work. It is designed to expose
the improvisational nature of the creative process, thereby revealing
a synergy between the explosive forces of the human imagination and
the unreasoning power of nature. It is no accident that the forms that
emerge from her brush seem to have a life of their own. They are rounded
and bulbous, with the illusionistic definition of identifiable objects.
But despite our willingness to accept them as possible entities in the
real world, they are also irreconcilably strange. Lengths of what appear
to be plumbing pipes and joints may end in apparatus that resemble giant
shoes or deformed telephone receivers. Intestine like coils become parts
of some mysterious machine. A soft propeller may power weird seed pods.
In some cases the images break out into three dimensions, but even that
affords the literalist no help. A section of aluminum tubing protrudes
the wall like some kind of strange religious icon, while a painted bellows
contraption blows air into a real dress. Strapped wooden contraptions
sit on the floor like the inner workings of old fashioned hoop skirts,
while a similar shaped image painted on the wall reads as a cage.
Winters notes that she has been inspired by the myth of Dionysus, the
Greek god of wine and revelry, who served in ancient times as a representative
of the intermingled forces of creation and destruction. The Dionysian
rites were frenzied, orgiastic affairs in which the god's acolytes were
as apt to kill or maim each other as they were to procreate.
For Winters, this myth reflects the nature of the creative process,
where new forms and ideas emerge from the destruction of old ones. She
has dramatized this notion in a gallery installation in 1999 in which
she worked by day in the gallery drawing on the walls while the gallerist
erased part of each days work that night. Here this is suggested by
the improvisational structure of the installation, which will be reconfigured
to fit each space on the tour, with new elements added and others discarded.
After being reconstructed at each venue, it will then be dismantled;
elements like wall drawings which are unique to the venue will be destroyed.
Returning to the Dionysian metaphor, Winters likens this to the process
by which vines in the vineyard are cut back each season so that they
will grow back more fully the following year. She points out that the
metaphor can be extended to the evolution of modern art, whereby new
movements and ideas rise out of the destruction of old ones.
These works also convey a larger point about the complex relationship
of nature and culture in the contemporary world. In these works, it
is almost impossible to disentangle organic forms from mechanical ones,
and they both seem to be driven by the same demonic forces. Thus, it
is possible to read a cautionary note in these works, which remind us
that technology, is a double edged power, at once promising to make
the world better while rendering it more dangerous.
Part Guston, part Loony Tunes, part Rube Goldberg, with a knowing reference
to the mechanized sexuality of Duchamp's Large Glass and a nod to the
apocalyptic frisson of Hollywood's romance with androids, Pretexts and
Subtexts blends humor and anxiety in an irresistible mix. Winters opens
a window into her creative process in order to help us reflect on our
own.
Eleanor Heartney is a new York-based art critic and author of Postmodern
Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art
Art In America
June 1992, Volume 80, No. 6, page 107
"Sandy Winters at Frumkin/Adams"
By Janet Koplos
Sandy Winters' images almost jump off the wall. It's easy to imagine that
they might escape from their confinement within the mundane bounds of
rectangular canvases and mutate into shaped paintings like Elizabeth Murray's,
or even into fully sculptural forms like John Newman's. But saying that
is not to wish it so: these paintings already give the impression of a
real-life solidity, which they combine with the heightened color and clarity
of an imagined world - and that's quite enough.
The imagery consists of not-quite-placeable forms that tend to look organic,
mechanical and arbitrary all at once. Each painting follows the same format:
within a border is a central still life arrangement that appears to rest
on top of an angular but never simply rectangular "carpet". The border
is primarily a single color (or at least a single tone) but is full of
incident. All kinds of stroking and scribbling are evident here, with
or without hues other than the dominant one.
All the paintings are 58 by 52 inches, a moderate size, and there's one
diptych. Yet, you have to view them from several yards back to avoid feeling
somehow physically impinged upon by the strange muscular forms Winters
depicts. Many of these objects might be taken for sea creatures, because
the fat, fleshy masses that define them seem so weightless. In all the
paintings there are snaky-looking elements that might be taken for marine
tubeworms. At times these shapes attach to a chunky, engine-like form
so that they take on an obscurely pneumatic aspect.
Whatever they are, the objects of Winters' consideration are occasionally
arranged one inside the other, as in The Best and The Worst of Times,
where within a flabby orange cylinder, a ball of string appears to be
suspended. Sometimes the encasement is protective, as in Gestation, where
Winters has rendered a kind of well-stuffed basket/cradle, or in Elektra,
Call Home, where a tilted form on the right panel might be a padded dog
bed. All three of these paintings create the impression that we're looking
down on something from an unexpected angle or a vertiginous height, providing
another reason to stand back from these canvases - to keep your footing.
Winters' surfaces are densely alive with marks, from the calligraphic
fragments in the borders to the repetitive stroking by which she defines
her mysterious forms. The linear application of distinct colors creates
an effect rather like that of pastels (except for the faint sheen that
reveals the medium oil paint) and also makes many of the swollen forms
look like cocoons or other wrapped objects. The linear reiteration also
contributes inferentially to the forms' three-dimensional impact: because
we can see how Winters energetically constructed them, they appear to
be substantial.
The effect of these paintings is one of pure pleasure: they convey delight
in the richness of pigment and the physical action of applying it to paper
or canvas, along with a conceptual enjoyment of making the everyday new.
Art in America
September 1998, No. 9, page 127
"Sandy Winters at George Adams"
By Jonathan Goodman
Sandy Winters' materially and emotionally exuberant exhibition consisted
of a drawn, painted and collaged wall installation titled Fresh Cuts (1997-8),
a smaller one called In Progress (1998) and four smallish works on paper
from 1997. Winters depicts forms that seem simultaneously derived from
machinery and from nature and which lend themselves to a variety of readings.
Often the works feel funkily irreverent and comically erotic; sometimes
too, they look like contraptions meant to suggest the physically overwhelming
workings of systems outside our control.
Fresh Cuts was a huge collage that followed the contours of the gallery
space. Made of aluminum, canvas, cardboard and charcoal, it sprawled across
a long wall and two smaller adjacent walls, creating a J-shaped installation.
The mix of rough materials - stamped tin ceiling panels, plywood, newspapers
and cardboard - gave the work an improvisational air, although one in
which an abstract narrative seems to play out. In Winters' work, one thing
leads to another; the scrawled forms, with their carefully worked out
proportions of parts, suggest the repetitive motions seen in factory machines,
as well as the interactions of bodies during sex. The work was a diagram
of oddly organic plumbing: on the left end, a big bulbous stomach shape
yielded to series of thick pipes. In the middle, connected to the pipes,
was some sort of industrial scrubber; at its bottom was a disk that had
wires projecting from its sides. Winters created a hybrid world of funny,
but also slightly threatening, composite objects.
Her interest in improvisation was evident in the small site-specific installation
In Progress. During the course of the show, as visitors watched, Winters
drew in conte and charcoal on four plywood panels covered with blackboard
paint. Polaroid snapshots documented changes in a big, slate-blue furnace-like
device from which emanated shapes conflating factory tools and implements
of war. In a gesture of deliberate openness, Winters allowed visitors
to study an unfinished work and to review her decisions.
The four drawings in the show furthered the artists desire to devise a
world of natural machinery. This is not so much a paradox as a conundrum
in which delights a primary virtue. The fans, gaskets and pipes don't
make any functional sense, and that's Winters' point exactly. She means
to seduce through laughter, and she succeeds.
ART News
June 1994, Volume 93, No. 5, page 158
"Sandy Winters at Frumkin/
Adams"
By Hearne Pardee
Sandy Winters seems enthralled by the wild and sometimes violent fertility
of natural forms. Her riotous conflations of plant and animal organs tend
toward the grotesque and bizarre. Yet she imposes painterly discipline
on the energies she unleashes, and these recent paintings reach a new
level of internal drama.
Having experimented in the past with relief and with irregularly shaped
canvases, Winters here finds new ways to explore and exploit the confines
of the conventional picture format. Some paintings are still composed
of multiple panels and most include collage, but these devices are compressed
into rectangular frames, enhancing the interplay of contrasting forces.
The central forms in each canvas are painted in sculptural fullness. They
bulge and threaten to bulge out into the viewer's space. Yet Winters constrains
their teeming energy by often cutting out and pasting down the painted
forms, as though to reinforce the contrast between the sharp outlines
and the organic forms they confine. And surrounding these forms are lightly
drawn grids and floating, improvisational shapes. Passages of bare canvas
show through around the edges, creating an open, spacious effect. These
margins relieve the oppressive heaviness of the central forms, while at
the same time suggesting some sort of breeding ground for their monstrous
growth.
In this unusual combination of drawing and painting, of construction and
nature, Winters compresses a wide range of allusions. Works such as Court
of Last Resort hint at both nature's violence and the violation of nature
by science and technology. Her vision is as disquieting as it is inventive.
Art News
Fall 1990, Volume 89, No. 8, page, 203
"Sandy Winters - Art
Museum of Florida International University"
By Elisa Turner
Sandy Winters has always focused on voluptuous, vegetal forms. In densely
packed paintings and mixed-media reliefs, she has described the sensual
colors and contours of foliage and fruits whose luxuriant growth is faintly
menacing. She explores the tension between ripeness and rot, procreation
and decay, while working the tangled stems and rotund pods and blossoms
for their nearly abstract, three-dimensional presence.
In previous works, Winters has shown architectural fragments, such as
columns and capitals, nearly obscured by the smothering embrace of lush
vegetation. In her recent work she has substituted mechanistic objects
or elements suggesting tribal artifacts. While a certain romanticism has
pervaded her art, exalting the dangerously exotic and vaguely recalling
Rousseau's fabulous jungles, these new oils on paper and canvas are more
aggressive and deliberately less beguiling.
Previous tensions have now escalated into conflict, as Winters employs
ever more dramatic imagery, scale and sense of volume. Part of the drama
arises from the way the angular boundaries of the compositions fall within
the edges of the white canvas or paper. Her compelling works push and
spill into the viewer's space, contrasting the dark, rich colors of the
organic forms with the dull brown and gray tones of the objects and artifacts.
These drab elements, sometimes suggesting spiked ocean mines, crudely
echo the contours of plant shapes.
The belligerent fusion of mechanistic and organic forms may also point
to the consequences of environmental rape. In Ask Not What Your Country
Can Do For You, a dark mine-like shape bursts from the painting's center,
bearing protrusions that recall spikes, buds and nipples. Thorny twigs
and coils, barbed and smooth, press against vibrant globes and cones that
evoke fruit and leaves. Talisman seethes with tightly compressed coils,
cones, and barbs. Contents are under pressure in Winters' art, sparking
a conflict between creative and destructive energies.
|
