Christine Sauerteig-Pilaar’s ‘Reflecting Refuge’ makes a humanitarian statement

TRIS MCCALL

Christine Sauerteig-Pilaar’s “Reflecting Refuge” installation at The 1978 Maplewood Arts Center.

The modern world contains an astonishing 120 million refugees. To put that in perspective … that is more than 12 times the population of New Jersey. More forcibly displaced people are presently wandering the globe than there have ever been in recorded history. Many of these refugees live in squalid tent cities. Others are on the run.

Refugees are the residue of conflict. Our current refugee crisis is an index of how violent our world has become. Those in power are increasingly drawn to savagely expedient solutions to their problems. Sometimes they try to ameliorate the suffering of those displaced by their aggression. More often, they don’t. The rest of us, consumed by the everyday challenges of our lives, barely think of refugees at all.

Not so for Garden State artist Christine Sauerteig-Pilaar. Recently, she has put the refugee crisis at the heart of her creative practice. Her life-sized tents, created with unusual materials, are designed and decorated to raise consciousness about the existential threats faced by the vulnerable. At Project 14C, an arts residency in Downtown Jersey City, Sauerteig-Pilaar presented a shelter made of old sewing forms. She has followed it up with “Reflecting Refuge,” an installation at The 1978 Maplewood Arts Center that stands as her most passionate intervention yet. Sauerteig-Pilaar has hung gouaches of refugee camp scenes set in conflict zones all over the planet: Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Congo. In the center of the space, she has constructed a single tent, large enough for two to inhabit, made from sheets of silvery Mylar.

Mylar is having a moment. The reflective polymer draws in viewers with its bossy treatment of light, which puddles, sizzles, zigzags and smears on its surface. At Gallery 14C’s excellent “Overlap: Life Tapestries” show, which presents the female body as a sociopolitical battleground, two of the scariest pieces lean hard on the chilliness of Mylar to make their points. Earlier this year, Nanette Carter covered the walls at the Montclair Art Museum with puzzle-like assemblies of painted Mylar plates and shards.

Sauerteig-Pilaar gives us Mylar in the raw and straight off the roller: big, unsentimental sheets of the stuff, affixed to metal poles, crinkling at the corners, but mostly flat and still as a mirror. To stand in front of this shelter is to see yourself.

TRIS MCCALL

The view from inside the tent.

You are invited inside. Once you have entered the tent, angled refractions are everywhere: the makeshift walls, the sharply pitched roof, and the polished gallery floor. Sauerteig-Pilaar throws visitors a few knit blankets, homespun and human-scale, to rest on. These brighten the monochrome interior. But once she has got you there, she won’t let you go without letting you hear the sounds of the encampments — children’s voices, the blades of the helicopters, the sirens, the discharge of munitions in the distance.

And for a moment, you may imagine: What if this was your life? What if this flimsy tent was all the shelter you had, and all you could govern was that which was in arm’s reach? How long would it take before you took leave of your senses or fell into despair?

Though refugee settlements are meant to be temporary, many displaced people are forced by cruel circumstances to hunker in camps for years. The silvery walls of Sauerteig-Pilaar’s foil tent hint of steel, especially from the inside, when a viewer is wrapped in their harsh embrace. Yet most people know Mylar best from toy balloons. A single prick from a pin would be enough to make this little refuge pop and spill out its human contents.

The tent also catches the reflections and amplifies the pathos of the show’s paintings on paper. The gouaches are uneven in quality. Some seem too obviously indebted to news photography and its obsession with faces under duress. These are effective but redundant: We already know these people are in trouble. A portrait of a Congolese woman and her baby in a familiar Madonna-and-Child pose carries universal appeal, but it is the rough cotton of the makeshift shelters behind the pair that really provides the narrative punch.

The best of the series are the ones that capture — in quick, urgent strokes — the exigencies of tent living.

In “Ukrainians in Ruskov, Russia,” a middle-aged woman in a floral dress walks heavily on a plank pathway between two rows of canvas shacks. Everything about the painting radiates exhaustion. It speaks powerfully of the humiliation of overcrowding, the insult of muddy ground, and the inadequacy of our response to the suffering of our fellow human beings.

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“Jordan,” by Christine Sauerteig-Pilaar.

In “Jordan,” a lone girl skips rope on a dirt expanse between hastily pegged tents. Her shadow is a wash of gray paint. Even as she exerts herself as best as she can, she is draining away.

The gouache series is best understood as a journalistic intervention akin in intent to Jacob Lawrence’s painted scenes of wartime America. It is, like the rest of the show, meant to be immersive. Sauerteig-Pilaar’s activist soul makes her distrust the efficacy of pictures on a wall, anyway: She wants you to crawl into her tent and see yourself shattered in the folds of the flaps. She shows in glossy galleries, but she reckons she will have a more lasting effect if she encourages you to get your hands dirty.

At the moment, “Reflecting Refuge” is, pointedly, a work in progress, and completing the installation depends on the willingness of visitors to play along. The artist encourages viewers to trace their hands on handkerchiefs and sewing forms, add a message, and leave it to her to hang them over the Mylar tent. This crowdsourced gesture of recognition and consolation will be unveiled, Sept. 5 at 6 p.m., and then it will be on view for the remainder of the weekend during the normal 1978 Maplewood Arts Center viewing hours: 1 to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

Normally, I am suspicious of art installations that solicit crowd participation. I don’t ever want to see a Post-it note dangling on anybody’s masterpiece. But “Reflecting Refuge” is such a passionate entreaty to give a damn about a global problem (that doubles as an indictment of the entire species) that the gesture feels not just appropriate but necessary.

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Christine Sauerteig-Pilaar’s “double roof” in “Reflecting Refuge.”

Sauerteig-Pilaar is practiced at turning sewing forms into great sheets that remind us of the human body and its need to be clothed and sheltered. In Maplewood, the artist has suspended her sail-like amalgamation from the ceiling, where it hovers protectively over the top of the tent. Lines and dashes of the sewing forms are mirrored in the Mylar. This superimposition gives her shelter a double roof: the cold polymer, impersonal, industrial and fragile; and the paper epidermis, equally prone to tearing, yet stitched together with care. With each hand added to the sheet, the structure becomes more human — more attached to a common predicament that demands collective action.

As humanitarian statements made in art galleries go, it is a coherent one. An irrefutable one, too.

Christine Sauerteig-Pilaar’s “Reflecting Refuge” will be at The 1978 Maplewood Arts Center through Sept. 7. Visit maplewoodartsandculture.org.

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