kiki smith’s sojourn
Traveled to the Brooklyn Museum yesterday to view Kiki Smith’s exhibit “Sojourn.”
Formal review? No. Reactions? Yes.
Nepal paper. Flimsy (in a good way).
No frames. Intimacy. Pages pasted up against the wall?
Were these sheets of paper taped together? The drawings are quite large, almost life-size.
Somehow the paper comes forward and interrupts the line. Fascinating. As though the figure were embedded in the paper and coming forward, or the paper was obliterating the figure, not sure which.
Paying special attention to the eyes, hands, and feet. The eyes of the central figure were especially piercing, carefully drawn, dark and not obscured. Looking toward the left. In two panels, this figure left her reading glasses on the chair. (Smiled.)
Floors looking like rubbing of wood grain. Some of the figures floated above the floor. Chairs a primary motif.
Delicacy, flimsiness, glitter, ephemerality. Feminine qualities. I am reminded of a graphic design class I took, where I produced some homework that was clearly feminine. Teacher’s comment – could this student come up with something more masculine? My thought – why?
Nothing can make me not enjoy glitter.
I did not enjoy the paintings of flowers, however. Skipped right over them to focus on the drawings of women. I also liked the little off-kilter papier-mache chairs very much. The birds. The light bulbs.
Detail of a drawing. The hands look like they are turning into wood, or into a furry animal’s hands. They are not clutching the leaves and flowers, but are rather draped around them. These hands belong to a possibly dying, possibly ailing woman, accompanied quietly by another woman at her bedside.
Another moving detail: eyes obliterated by a paste-on set of lids with clumsily cut lashes. Almost invisible unless you looked very closely.
Why would the artist obliterate the eyes? A blindness? An inward-looking? A sensation of being tired of sense perceptions, tired of looking? This gesture felt extremely satisfying to me though, especially after observing all the piercing and/or vacant eyes on previous panels. A gesture of extraordinary privacy.