I just spent 4 hours reading about and looking at the work of Kathryn Cellerini. Cellerini, the featured artist at Full Circle Gallery in August, is an ambitious contemporary artist, having a BFA from Oregon State and an MFA from the State University at Stony Brook. She works in a wide range of materials with a breathtaking desire to pull together disparate ideas.
However, the work Cellerini is showing at Full Circle is a coherent grouping, delightfully approachable, and easy to enjoy. Once the surface recognition has been breached, however, she is full of surprises.
Kathryn Cellerini, drawing series (chora), 2011, charcoal, conté crayon, graphite, woodblock prints and colored pencil on paper. Part of Drawings and Cogitations at Full Circle Gallery in August 2011.
Cellerini’s artist statement comes directly from her work in the MFA program at Stony Brook (disclaimer: I was a 1974 graduate of SUNY/Stony Brook). I love the ideas of her artist statement — and find the writing heavily academic (not exactly a compliment). Basically, I sussed out that Cellerini is trying to draw together her varied personal memories — physical and emotional — to make varied kinds of art — installations, drawings, sculpture — using varied materials (welded pipes, tea bags, hand-drawn prints). If this sounds complex yet sort of normal for Portland, well, when I read her perfectly straightforward blog , which shows a completely different persona, and checked out the art she presents on her website, yet another dimension of her work, I find I’m quite boggled.
Kathryn Cellerini, Maquette, hand pulled woodblock prints, chicken wire, teabags, and beeswax, 2011(?) About 10 x 6″. At Full Circle Gallery, August 2011.
For example, the small Maquette, at Full Circle this month, was made as a study for an close-to-room-sized installation/sculpture, Viniculum, exhibited February, 2011, at the Lawrence Alloway Gallery at Stony Brook. Viniculum is made of hand-pulled woodblock prints, tissue paper, chicken wire, copper wire, berries, beeswax, tea bags, and etched copper poles welded into a monkey-bar form. The structure is larger than life, presenting a structure that can be climbed into and viewed from a variety of angles. In a photo on her blog, she can be seen inside Viniculum. Looking at Maquette makes me feel like I’m suddenly enlarged, or conversely, looking at her sitting inside the Viniculum installation, I think she has shrunk to fit inside.
The title and explanation of the meaning of Viniculum is based on an essay by philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Just as she uses a welded monkey-bar (in Viniculum) and chicken wire (Maquette) as physical supports on which to hang her art, in her art statements she uses somewhat obscure philosophic concepts (Julia Kristeva as well as Deleuze) to give a structure to her artistic reactions to her experiences in the external world.
Cellerini says, “Because we define ourselves through memory and world experience, Deleuze’s writings helped me visualize a new way to show the relationships between self-perception and physiology.”
My response to her work, however, did not initially ally itself with her personal exploration and identify (that came as I looked at her presentation of self on her website). What I loved about the drawings were the intertwining of the muffled, veiled, amorphous shapes as they encountered the sometimes scribbled, sometimes hexagonal lines.
Kathryn Cellerini, drawing series (chora), 2011, charcoal, conté crayon, graphite, woodblock prints and colored pencil on paper. Part of Drawings and Cogitations at Full Circle Gallery in August 2011.
In at least one of the drawings at Full Circle, monsters, or at least slightly menacing creatures, appear — or so I saw when I looked at them. Another person in the gallery was puzzled by my vision. But when I read that Cellerini was interested, because of personal history, in “stylized digestive organs” my reading seemed appropriate.
Kathryn Cellerini, drawing series (chora), 2011, charcoal, conté crayon, graphite, woodblock prints and colored pencil on paper. Part of Drawings and Cogitations at Full Circle Gallery in August 2011.
The drawings are beautifully presented, using simple materials to make elegant frames. And that’s part of the paradox: an artist statement which is both obscure and fraught with revelations about uncomfortable personal experiences, objects that are totally charming, even beautiful, and beautifully crafted, a blog that presents a pleasant blog-life, much like that of my friends, and the knowledge, garnered from the artist’s statement and her previous artworks as depicted on her website, that she is concerned with the viewer’s experience, with the relationship of art to viewer and her relationship with those viewers, even as she stands apart from them: well, I’m boggled. And challenged. And enriched.
Kathryn Cellerini, drawing series (chora), 2011, charcoal, conté crayon, graphite, woodblock prints and colored pencil on paper. Part of Drawings and Cogitations at Full Circle Gallery in August 2011.
In other words, the art objects to be seen and admired at Full Circle this month are merely a nod at a bigger, far more ambitious way that Cellerini is exploring her inner self, presenting it publicly, and hoping to intertwine the viewer into that exploration. A most admirable work-in-progress, in the largest sense of the phrase.
–June
PS. Cellerini connects the chicken wire to her experiences in rural Oregon. I have similar connections but in a later, different, life, I made quilterly connections – hexagons are intrinsic to the quilt pattern, Grandma’s Flower Garden. And I also used chicken wire and fabric for some fabric sculptures I made in yet a different artistic life. We live many lives, all of us, and Kathryn Cellerini is exploring visually and physically one sequence of hers.
PS #2: The title quote comes from a letter written by Georgia O’Keefe.
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