Alexandra Schoenberg’s “Unframing 2” can be seen at The Hillside Square Gallery in Montclair.
Architects cannot resist firm, straight lines. Their models and diagrams are full of them. Creating an illusion of three dimensions, for instance, is as easy as linking the corners of overlapping rectangles. Draftspeople have made careers out of such visual trickery.
A few architecturally inspired artists are drawn to the economy and expedience of the drawn straight line, too. Alexandra Schoenberg’s “Shifting Perspectives,” which will be on view at The Hillside Square Gallery in Montclair through June 26, is loaded with rigid right angles, diagrams of massive tower blocks in outline, and ruler-assisted pencil marks. A Schoenberg is often crammed corner to corner with trellises, buttresses, girders, cantilevered bits, and endless fenestration. There is nothing in her work that indicates what material these structures are made of, but presumably it is futuristic. No builder would ever be mad enough to use her drawings of impossible skyscrapers as blueprints, but Schoenberg hardly minds. She stays fluent, and eloquent, in the visual language of architecture and adapts it to her own poetic needs.
Across town, another artist takes a different approach to the line. In “Sharp Teeth, Long Tongues!,” a playful haunting of Montclair’s BrassWorks Gallery, almost nothing runs straight. Textile artist Ann Vollum handstitches curves, arcs and squiggles into vintage linen sheets that have been wrinkled and yellowed by the years. Many contain representations of charismatic monsters threatening and sometimes devouring buttoned-down characters from mid-20th Century school primers. Three-dimensional cloth pieces hung on the wall resemble baguettes and tubers dotted with plumbing washers and bound together by string. These face down colorful wet-felted pieces that look like plush amoebas as they might have been imagined and assembled by Dr. Seuss. A few resemble viruses on the prowl for cells to perturb.
Ann Vollum’s “Formations.”
Provocation like this is nothing new for a creator who has been shaking up New Jersey group shows for the past few years and who has contributed productive unruliness to a category that can sometimes be stitched-up and staid. It is, however, exciting, illuminating and maybe even terrifying to encounter and digest so much Vollum all at once. The artist is clearly concerned about the loss of childhood innocence to the specters that surround us, but she has some sympathy for her grinning dinosaurs, too. Hers is a sustained vision, agitated and fizzy like a shaken bottle of soda pop — just as Schoenberg’s is.
Perhaps that is why these two shows, different as they are, feel related. Both artists are channeling forces that they respect — but also fear. Vollum exposes us to the perils (and thrills) of chaos, and examines the crooked saber tooth hidden behind the cute smile. Schoenberg pushes order to the brink of logic, with everything physically possible, but still daunting, imposing, and tough to scale.
Squares connote rationality, organization and the man-made world, and in Schoenberg’s “Atopos 7” and “Atopos 9,” the artist-architect hypnotizes us with them. She gives us hundreds of them, each one a little window into the recesses of what appears to be a massive mid-city office building that, it is implied, stretches far past the frame. Some squares are drawn on a Mylar sheet that wraps around the outside of wall-mounted boxes; others are visible on another panel behind the Mylar. Since both surfaces are busy with overlapping quadrilaterals, the artist is able to generate a feeling of happenstance. We see no people, but we see things that people must have built: columns, frames, windows, darkened chambers in the corporate deep. Command of color, shape and shading makes it feel like we are viewing this building at an angle, perhaps on a speeding train through the city center. Are those colored monorail lines stopping on different floors of “Atopos 9”? Do the diagonal columns in “Atopos 7” indicate the presence of escalators? Or is Schoenberg simply playing with our expectations about what a big metropolitan building is supposed to look like?
Alexandra Schoenberg’s “San Cataldo 4.”
“Unframing 2” (see above), another piece that makes good use of the translucent quality of Mylar, probes further. Here, Schoenberg pulls apart a three-story structure, bringing elements of its design and the shape of its framework into the foreground. Against a pink field marked by thin diagonal lines, Schoenberg sets cubes, diamonds, lozenges and tipped-over hexagons. She is calling our attention to the geometric ingredients that underpin construction, and asking us to marvel at their austere beauty. In “San Cataldo 4,” she doesn’t even give us the building. Instead, it is a confetti-fall of shapes in different pastel colors. This could be the residue of light, reflected off high glass panels as a traveler perceives the tower at different angles. The skyscraper has been excised, yet somehow, we know it is there.
Can all of these straight lines and protractor angles maintain their tensile strength in a bent world? Schoenberg, a true believer in architecture, seems to believe they can. But she also concedes that there are other forces at work. Her “Archiplastia” series, made during the plague year of 2021, juxtaposes blocks, beams, windows and multi-story buildings with objects that look organic in origin. A mass of tangled sinew hangs on a wire suspended between two edifices. Segmented tentacles climb like ivy all over a honeycomb of sharp-cornered squares. Odd tendrils float in the apertures of high walls.
None of this is anything a reputable architect would allow on a blueprint. These unidentifiable objects nose their way into the master plan anyway. Schoenberg knows that she is introducing trouble to the airless realm of the architectural model. But she is also asking why we prefer the stark visual rhythms of the inanimate and uninhabited to the messy stuff of life.
Alexandra Schoenberg’s “Archiplastia 9.”
Some of Schoenberg’s “Archiplastia” objects look so much like Ann Vollum’s weird creature-amalgams that you may think they are working from a common source. In a way, they are.
Like the rest of us, Schoenberg and Vollum have had to grapple with COVID-19. They have faced a bizarre beast that, without malignant intent, caused a whole heck of a lot of havoc. Vollum’s wall of tufted oddities seem to have been inspired by the deep sea, and the sea represents the unconscious and unknowable. Adorable and colorful they are, but they are inscrutable, too. They’ve got their squidlike feelers pointed in our direction, and they mean business. Likewise, her oblong stacks of sewn-together bundles of earth-toned fabric sprout coiled roots. These alien objects intend to take hold. They seem hungry.
But to really fathom Vollum’s trepidation — not to mention her black humor — BrassWorks visitors must turn the corner and engage with her stitched work. In “Monday Mourning!,” an alarmed girl in pigtails and Mary Janes is encircled by a red dragon. Its lolling tongue curves, scythe-like, in front of her feet, and its serrated-edge tail practically tickles her behind. Two monster claws frame her astonished face, and the beast gives her a covetous sideways glance. We’re also treated to a glimpse of the inside of the monster’s belly, where a sextet of sinners writhes in hellfire. Will the girl be the seventh? Or will her star-spangled dress ensure her escape? In a crowning gesture of mischief, Vollum decorates the corners of the linen with cloth flowers.
It’s all a bit Brueghel, a bit Gorey, and more than a bit like a page of a “Golden Book” gone bad.
Ann Vollum’s “The Last Laugh!”
We worry about the girl. But we are also charmed by the monster, an honest sort who makes his wicked intent admirably clear. The girl’s manner of dress marks her as a person of the past. The dragon’s energy and voraciousness makes him a creature of the present. In “The Last Laugh!,” another schoolgirl is dragged upside down by a flame-spitting flier and snapped at by a grave-robbing snake; in “R.I.P,” a couple of clueless toddlers wander way too close to a skeletal fiend while a baby falls into a funeral urn. The lizards are active while the human beings are bystanders in peril, and the love and care with which Vollum animates her diabolical predators may make you wonder who really has her sympathy. Sometimes she leaves the humans out altogether and lets the big bad wolves have the spotlight. They do well in it: They’re wild things, and wild things speak to hidden, primordial desires. It is hard to imagine a child of any age preferring Dick and Jane to these dinosaurs.
Ann Vollum unleashes beasts, Alexandra Schoenberg unleashes buildings. Both subjects have roots in the real, and in established art practices: blueprints for “Shifting Perspectives,” stitching and felting for “Sharp Teeth, Long Tongues!” But both shows, no matter how traditional they sometimes seem, are flights of imagination. One is a dream of structures without end. The other is reverie about innocence from an artist who not-so-secretly identifies with the freaks.
The shadow of COVID falls across both exhibitions. Most importantly, both creators realize something crucial. If you really want to make an impression, it helps to be a little scared of what you’re making.
The Hillside Square Gallery in Montclair will present “Alexandra Schoenberg: Shifting Perspectives” through June 26; visit bravitas.com/galleries-events/hillside-square-gallery.
BrassWorks Gallery in Montclair will present “Ann Vollum: Sharp Teeth, Long Tongues!” through May 22; visit bravitas.com/galleries-events/brassworks-gallery.
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