Kate Levant’s Invisible Systems
Simultaneously sparse and immersive, Valerian Dials for Trembling Hands evokes the stillness of an ocean after a shipwreck or storm.
DETROIT –– Valerian Dials for Trembling Hands, which ends today at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Detroit, is one of two nearly concurrent exhibitions from artist Kate Levant. In my review of the other show, now closed — …Which’s Ploying the Fans at Monique Meloche in Chicago — last weekend, I referred to Levant’s “preoccupation with the systems that sustain life and society, and the consequences of their breakdown.” This show, like the previous one, touches on themes of climate change and natural disasters, like tsunamis and flooding, signifying the fraught relationship between biological, ecological, and capitalist systems.
The shows also reflect their respective environments in a very real sense, in that Levant assembles the final pieces in the gallery. Detroit’s Susanne Hilberry Gallery is an expansive space with calm, muted light filtering in from large windows. Simultaneously sparse and immersive, Valerian Dials for Trembling Hands evokes the stillness of an ocean after a shipwreck or storm. As with …Which’s Ploying the Fans, the color palette is mostly neutral — black or indigo-black, silver, off-white, and earth tones are broken up only by occasional bursts of bright red: strips of red canvas and red chopsticks emblazoned on a collage; red chopsticks scattered across a sprawling silver-and-black floor installation; and elsewhere, spilling out of a black plastic bag on the floor, along with seaweed and a package of turmeric. (All works in the show are untitled and dated 2016.)
The plastic grocery bag, chopsticks (screwed together at one end and fanned out), packaged turmeric, seaweed, and, in the latter installation, a jug of motor oil construct a symbolic language of Western co-optation of and encroachment upon Eastern cultures. The juxtaposition of natural and synthetic elements in the floor piece and in three nearby installations on white pedestals invokes a larger narrative of nature colonized and fetishized by capitalist society. The global lines drawn by Levant’s materials intersect at points of political and ecological tension: plastic bags, motor oil, and oceanic life are intertwined in a web of monetary and symbolic value.
At the same time, these intersecting lines diminish the distance between geographic and sociopolitical spheres, and illuminate the layers of meaning that have accrued over the last century upon, for example, seaweed or motor oil. In one installation, seaweed, kelp, and chopsticks are heaped in a rectangular plastic tray encircled by length of steel wire. The gradation of color, from black to indigo to rust and golden-brown, visually coheres the work, while the geometric simplicity of the rectangle and circle are complemented by the almost baroque interlacing of the gossamer seaweed strands. Levant creates the same effect with two more small installations, one juxtaposing a bin of seaweed, kelp, and bits of discarded metal with a “fan” of interwoven seaweed strands and chopsticks, and the other pairing two chopstick fans with Petri dishes and other disparate objects, including electrical tape, ear buds, and Band-Aids. All the objects are integrated to the extent that the whole supersedes the found-object parts.
While Levant coaxes out formal affinities in her installations and collages, another commonality shared by her materials, and by extension her artworks, is their relationship with the human body. Although bodies are always implicit in the invisible systems that Levant maps –– from global trade to humanitarian aid –– this exhibition foregrounds the extent to which systems are embodied through the twin cycles of growth and decay, consumption and waste.
The hands in the title are reified in hand-like shapes recurring throughout the exhibition. (They were also in Levant’s show at Monique Meloche in Chicago.) Near the gallery entrance, a cutout black hand greets the viewer from a canvas banner layered with off-white nylon spinnaker. The ambiguity of the shape –– it could be waving to or yielding the viewer –– is repeated in a 75 x 122-inch black canvas sheet on its own wall in the next room. Here, the hand is made of the off-white spinnaker sail superimposed on the canvas; it reaches out horizontally, with multiple prongs, like a fork or broom.
In another piece, a semi-transparent, excessively fingered hand hangs upside down along a 98 x 34-inch length of aluminum foil. The upper half of the foil is layered by a white nylon sheet with a large circle cut out of the center to reveal the foil beneath. The diaphanous materials softly gleam with the quality of fine textiles, creating a sense of movement and tactility that reflects the “trembling” in the title.
The hands and feet are the legible marks of the body, not only in the artwork, but in the disembodied systems to which the art refers; they serve as the agents of movement, creation, and destruction. In my review of …Which’s Ploying the Fans, I cited art historian Michael Fried’s description of Minimalism (which he calls “literalism”) as “theatrical” in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood.” Fried writes, “[T]he experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation –– one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder” [emphasis Fried’s]. The presence of the artwork includes the viewer in the experience, with a self-conscious awareness in relation to it.
An architectural black canvas sheet layered with wide rectangular strips of aluminum foil spans the height of a front gallery wall. The materiality of this piece –– its presence –– is inextricable from the symbolic presence of the canvas and foil, glimpsed throughout the show, and the presence of the viewer, as the black and silver oscillate between absorption and reflection.
A similar piece in the next room relocates the black-and-silver expanse to the floor, with a scattering of red chopsticks and two small cylindrical heat chambers atop it, one with a burst of coral attached like a bird on a roost. The orientation of the piece emphasizes the viewer’s self-awareness (we have to walk around it). It also creates the kind of illusionistic space that is rare in the artist’s minimal, architectural, and largely abstract aesthetic. As the shimmering surface evokes a body of water, the piece, and surrounding artworks, dredge up systems of exchange built on the radical inequality between nations and people in a global capitalist economy. Without notice, almost accidentally, we find ourselves present within it.
Valerian Dials for Trembling Hands continues at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery (700 Livernois, Ferndale, Michigan) through today.
