Articles
Reclamation of the Territory - T. Whiten
We Search for Ourselves in Each Other - G. Hickey
Clip out of MATRIART - M. J. Barkhouse
RECLAMATION OF THE TERRITORY - by Tim Whiten 1990
Tim Whiten is a practicing
North American Artist,
Senior Scholar and Professor Emeritus at York University, Toronto.
We live
contemporarily in an age of fragmentation and multiplicity, a time in which
material concerns and singularity are evidence of the assertion of the ego, of
a will to personal empowerment as a way to signify the resentment of having
been cut off from the central source of original power and belonging. Our sense
of SELF and personal esteem have been thwarted. We collectively feel the need
for integration and healing through trust and caring as a means of finding
continuity.
Recently,
artist’s having acknowledged this need have sought to provide a means of
psychic healing through a reidentification of the resident power historically
celebrated in myth.
Herbert
Reed maintains that “cult objects made by primitive people - idols, fetishes
and totems - are automatically endowed with this dynamism, and a close
relationship is thus established between form and the power of a work of art”.
This power, given definition through form, exists as a recognition and
manifestation of the interdependency of material and spiritual energies. The
work of Katherine Zsolt is a celebration of form and interdependency, an
attempt to acknowledge and accept the human need to belong, trust and care,
while simultaneously asserting that to do so reclaims the territory of SELF and
personal authority through psychic healing.
The territory reclaimed here is that which is made up of the consciously manifest interdependent energies of people - in this instance particularly female.
Through a
series of personal gestures (signs of supplication) and casting as a process of
replication, Katherine invests her work with authority and form. She in her
process assumes a position of responsibility and caring, the result of a
verbalized willingness of her subjects to trust, materialized by placing
themselves in a situation of physical restraint in which they are dependent
upon others - i.e. Katherine and whatever support system set up by her and her
assistants to temporarily care for their physical and psychological needs.
The art presents the sense of trust and caring as materialized signs, replications of female figures, representations of a feminine collective embodying dependence, meaning, identifying through mutual interdependence “that immanent in all things”, the strength and power of unity in collective authority. The SELF as defined by Joseph Campbell is the Greater Unity, of which we are all a part. Katherine and the subjects involved in her casting process access this sense of unity and the work which results is the fulcrum of our awareness, their self-conscious understanding realized. These images point to process and “the other” as catalyst for meaning. They also point to the “original” in ways which relate to perceived realities and yet assert difference (differentiation and integration).
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Casting
implies a continuation, a generative act of process, ongoing similarity,
continuity as well as difference. The materials used suggest healing; bandages
to bind and protect the physical and as with the use of plaster to set broken
limbs, to make whole. Heat given off in the one-way chemical reaction during
the setting time, here parallels psychic healing and relates to the purging and
purifying agent of fire, the universal solvent.
These “armour like” body casts function metaphorically as cocoons which restrain, provide protection and all the conditions necessary for transformation. The materials used in the process act as the means and later exist as sign, having borne witness as well as having participated in the materialization of form.
Inherent in Zsolt’s recent work are a series of inversions, the major one as in Zen, an indication of the greatest restriction as a way of asserting the greatest freedom and that which through the outward conscious subjugation of will results in a return to inner strength and SELF recognition.
Whether suspended from the ceiling, floating on a wall or supported by wheels, the female figures as replications imply a referential construct which makes for an important condition of transformation and mutual dependency. One can consider suspension and its use here in relation to the restriction of time as when the Chrysalis is held in the cocoon attached to the limb of a tree, a condition which gives it a reference to the ongoing and continuous; the stable referential which helps to make possible the great transformation. The use of neon is also a reference to the continuous, for light is the eternal referent, that which is an ongoing ever present sign, the manifest attribute of the ineffable. The combining of hydrogen and helium presents a point for which we as humans through our understanding of the world view of science, can relate to the building of our self in and as the cosmos, being borne of and existing as light. The auric framing of Katherine’s floating wall-bound figures by neon is in itself a way of identifying the self as light centered, presenting a most important awareness about the great transformation - to Externalize the Internal. This is a most important condition in so far as it seems to make up the means of the “Grand replication” (similar and yet different, differentiated and yet integrated).
Katherine
reclaims the territory of SELF in her personal recognition of humaness. She
assists us in redefining a way in which we can see trust and caring as a sense
of willing dependency, a strength and a way of acknowledging our unity. She
shows us that the weakness of human need is our strength and provides a way of
realizing our eternal light through internal authority. The work relates that
which is immanent in all things and is replicated in every extension of the
original, connects all things, and through personal reclamation is both
transformational and healing.
Tim Whiten
We Searched for Ourselves in Each Other
The art of Katherine Zsolt by Gloria Hickey 2009
Gloria Hickey is a contemporary arts writer, critic and curator living in St. John's Newfoundland.
The sculpture of Katherine
Zsolt defies conventional explanation. Her installations and work with the human figure is enigmatic and
fertile, an intriguing combination of the mundane and the sacred. As an individual Katherine Zsolt is
passionate about people, the built environment and the fate of the planet. She is enthusiastic about much and disturbed
by mankind's insatiable greed. She is an
advocate for a rich inner life. Zsolt is
a daughter, student of life and a sculptor for more than thirty-five
years. She uses her talents as a
sculptor and storyteller to engage our senses and minds, to weave with our
imaginations and intuitions an alternate world of possible solutions, of ways
of living with tenderness instead of indifference.
It would be easy but wrong to categorize Zsolt's sculpture as embodying only a feminist or environmental philosophy when in fact she is more closely aligned with the Surrealists. In her Waiting a small human figure is crouched under a white plaster cover, a cocoon umbilically attached to a branch like a fruit bud or moth.
Yes, the earth is asserted as life force and
one we would do well to be connected to but here also is the Surrealist trilogy
of: the surprise, the unexpected juxtaposition and the non sequitor. Remember that the Surrealists were born of
the terrifying conflict of World War I, not unlike the terrorism of misogyny,
cultural conflict and ecological threat that frames Zsolt's work. Her Daughters
and Sisters was made in the aftermath of the
Despite the chronological
gap between the early Surrealists and Zsolt's contemporary sculpture Katherine
finds common ground in the near mysticism of artists like Salvador Dali,
Constantin Brancusi and Max Ernst. They
upend the ordinary with its mundane values finding extraordinary meaning
through dreams and spirituality. Likewise, Zsolt points to filmmakers Luis
Buñuel and Sergei Parajanov as influential to her work. She was and is attracted to their improbable
vignettes, impossible but picturesque scenarios. Although not strictly a surrealist, Parajanov
is a visual poet whose sense of sacred ritual within the daily is nothing short
of primal. He is an inspiration to
Zsolt.
What separates Zsolt from
the Surrealists is that while they turned to Freud's brand of psychotherapy
Zsolt finds more productive tools in Jungian analysis, the writing of Robert
Bly and especially the feminist approach of Marion Woodman.
In fact, Katherine Zsolt's most recent body of work is titled after Woodman's book Leaving My Father's House, A Journey to Conscious Femininity.
Woodman's book traces the journeys of three women as they struggle and discover their own inner strength through Woodman's guided analysis of their dreams. In each case it is the tapping of the female, intuitive resources that allows them to grow.
Zsolt was drawn to Woodman's potent interpretation of the Allerleirauh fairy tale by Grimm, which is also reprinted in the book's Appendix. Allerleirauh means of many different kinds of fur and another fairy tale The Donkey Skin is a close cousin. In either tale, a young princess escapes the impossible demands of her royal father by fleeing under a cloak of animal skin and fur. (Allerleirauh means all kinds of fur.) After taking refuge in the dark cloister of the earth and forest, she is captured as a hairy beast. This "hairy beast" is taken to a royal court and forced into domestic service. In secret, the princess attires herself in her royal gowns: one as golden as the sun, one as silvery as the moon and a third as bright as the stars. These dresses embody the aspects of the solar male intellect, the lunar female intuition and the universal consciousness of the stars, which combines both male and female, light and dark. Eventually, the princess integrates these aspects and reveals herself through a series of gestures and symbolic objects. She finds her love-filled happy ending.
Zsolt has consistently been attracted to fairy tales as archetypal narratives that explore the vulnerability and wisdom of women and children. Like Woodman she asserts that the feminine exists within men and women, old and young, and is a valuable asset. The language of both dreams and fairy tales subverts rational or conventional masculine thinking. It is like a mirror world where one thing appears as another: left is right, up is down and the useless hairy beast is a resourceful, integrated princess. It is not a simple case of disguise but rather a positioning of opposites as not just complementary but symbiotic. They are part of the same continuum where one becomes the other. And this is where the optimism creeps in, the possibility of resolution or transformation.
(Click image to see video of last room in 'Leaving my Father's House' in PHX)
The Surrealist landscape
is an inner landscape; the view outside is a projection of our inner states –
an axiom that is also consistent with the world of fairy tales and Jungian
analysis. The dark shadows of the
archetypal woods are the shadows of our minds: hiding places, forbidden places
and also incubators for growth. The
landscape may at first confuse us until we recognize it as our own. If the landscape or environment is an
extension of ourselves how can we be indifferent to it? This is how tenderness replaces indifference. Then the fairy tale becomes an autobiography
of empowerment.
Katherine Zsolt takes us on a journey that holds the promise of discovery and growth. She is interested in sustaining the nurturing self. It is her goal to ensure that it is part of the world. Katherine Zsolt knows full well that is where hope lies.
Gloria Hickey . Canadian Arts Writer . Critic . Curator
A clip from
the Matriart Article on the 1990 exhibition "Don't Remain Silent" - (Group exhibition about the Montreal shootings)
"…To my mind some of the most engaging images or ones that call up remembrance
in complex ways and thus, foreground the instability of making mean(s) / making
sense. The installation piece " Daughters and Sisters" by Katherine
Zsolt, Ruth Koski Harris's canvas " Pieta", and Christie Wilcox
triptych, " D'une Moment de la Vie", are all noteworthy in this
regard. "Daughters and Sisters" is made up a body casts (of 14 of
Zsolt's women friends) hanging, by their bound feet upside down from the
ceiling. The women are nude and with slight variation use their hands and arms
to "cover" (protect?) their torsos. Facial features are replaced with
black shapes that might be interpreted either as masks are holes. This is a
surprisingly beautiful and powerful installation: simultaneously it evokes a
remembrance of the 14 women killed in Montréal, " pairs" each of them
with a body of a living woman, and in through feature-less (anonymous) faces
invites women to see ourselves in these bodies / align ourselves with the dead.
It has become almost a (feminist) rally-cry to remember the names, to etch them
indelibly in (social) memory; i think that this installation revises that call:
foregrounding remembrance of the women as lived (in) bodies/ for grounding
remembrance as (so often) embodied…."
Mary Jane Barkhouse for MATRIART