New Neighbors / Near Neighbors Mari Andrews by Steve Skaar

Ekphrastic Poetry Workshop, Emeryville Art Exhibition 2024 with Sarah Kobrinsky

Writers were invited to respond to works in the show by creating a portrait of the artist or using their work as a mirror to ourselves.  I chose the suite of nine wall-mounted sculptures by Mari Andrews.

New Neighbors / Near Neighbors  Mari Andrews by Steve Skaar

Like Mari, I’m mad about mica, though more of a casual user.  Like her I’m both transparent and reflectively opaque, sometimes intentionally so.

We’ve met only once, though I’ve admired her art for years.  New neighbors, I guess, my paintings¹ hang on the other side of her wall.  Near neighbors, it’s dangerous to assume commonality between two bodies of work.  There’s not a subtle bone in my soul.

It seems at first sacrilegious to describe these spiritual pieces with words, to refer to them by name, by their nine pinned numbers.  But the sculptor has gifted us these names, and close inspection reveals her piece’s numbers are assigned in alphabetical order, the numbers placed to move our eyes.  I begin to feel more ekphrastic already.  Working backwards, then, in an order of my choosing:

 

(9) New Neighbors: Two in One

Two medallions of the transparent mineral are suspended within a frame formed from sections of an old-timey metal measuring stick (she calls it a ‘measurer’).  Cinched with wire at the waist into an hourglass shape, perhaps a female figure, three twists of the same thin wire secure the mica ovoids in space.   A single twist provides the pivot point for each angle of the framework, its markings tarnished beyond reading.

 

 

 

(8) New Neighbors:  Scalloped Opening

I called them ‘scallops’ in my mind before reading Mari’s title.  Short, U-shaped sections of steel rod.  There are sixteen of them, welded into a flat near-circle scarcely large enough to accept your head.  As a child and as an adult I’ve spent dozens of hours sketching many-sided forms like this, but drawing is not welding, I think of the challenge of maintaining symmetry when applying so much heat.

(7) New Neighbors:  Irregular Joint

In what manner irregular?  The head of a single small nail pokes the seam of the sutured sides.  A slip of the shears or a found feature of this malleable metal?  I discern a chocolate finish to the left piece, a faint vertical band of gray edging the right that speaks of differing origins.   In my long ago past lead is also the reminder of a joint, the seams between sections of Mom’s broken stained-glass window melted into beautiful liquid by my brothers and me above a stub of candle and poured into molds carved from wood.

 

(6) New Neighbors:  Irregular Glyph

The beguiling contours of this figure belie its flat nature, not an issue were it drawn but a conundrum when you recognize that it’s cut from a single sheet of lead.  It must be discontinuous, a subtle separation permitting its slight overlap.   Many of my paintings and drawings are of glyphs² so I relish these characters, relish the word.  A lot of my sensibility derives from the contemplation both of irregularity and of unknown languages³.  I’ll let this smashed typograph speak for itself.

 

 

(3) New Neighbors:  Deep Dive

As soon as I start writing I don’t see anymore, but I can return often to the well.  I spent about an hour, discarding first impressions, thinking about Mari’s materials, her numbering.  Deep Dive is an audacious dagger of a plunge into near J-space, a grid of made metal, folded flat and reabsorbed.

Within its meshed armature a tracery of fine wire descends, each cell a new abstract study.  Deep Dive evaded me at first, though it’s the largest of these artworks, a looming presence in my right eye.  Maybe she is tumbling down a slide, I imagined.

 

(2) New Neighbors: Catcher

Curated into a corner was my first glib remark, but I didn’t have to look long to see the artist’s hand.  Catcher is the centerpiece of this display, tipped toward us, as if to offer a seat to our vision.  Other references come to mind, the curved measurer that counts degrees of longitude on a globe, a Gods-eye, a dream-catcher, the silk strands of a web that draw together two near surfaces.  Beware the seductive presence of the spideress nearby.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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"New Neighbors" means the placement of artworks that haven't previously lived next to each other.   I suspect Mari found satisfaction in the mental motion her whimsical numbering creates in the mind of her beholders, including the repeated dip to the left to determine the titles of the pieces.   Which came first, egg or chicken?   As I mentioned above, the numbers were assigned in alphabetical order, according to their titles.   Next, surely the artist chose to locate the pieces on the two walls according to visual principles and/or meaning, not "in order".

Like me, Mari dissembles when she assigns recent dates to her work.  I vividly recall our conversation during a pre-pandemic Open Studio in which I saw Black Bowl, Two in One, and the two Irregulars.   Why lie about the age of your children?  For two reasons.  First, rules.  The Emeryville show requires work submitted to have been executed within the last five years.  The second reason is more sadly profound--not many people are looking, or really remember for very long.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pieces not described

(5) Graduated Grid

 (4) Dewdrop Oblong

(1) Black Bowl

==========================Footnotes====================================

 

1  Paintings from my Alembix series, clockwise, from top         left:

      

    "Waters Within"

    "Corazon"

    "Lamp for Alistair"

    "Three-Banger"   

 

and the much more extensive drawing series from which these pieces come:

https://alembix.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

²Glyphics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

³Painting in Tongues
Stephen M. Skaar


They begin most often with a headache, a migraine that disrupts perception from within, a postnasal trickle of vision. The mildest are simply archaeologies, incised mental images that are revealed by our brushes’ ability to wisk away the overlaid gravel and dust. In these grooved inscriptions we find confirmation of the truth of the old stories, reassert our ancient civilization.

More clinically serious are the prophecies and hallucinations. Can we credibly claim that we of the winged sandal are the deliverers of a divine message? Only with the greatest humility and the most potent psychoactive pharmacology. And yet, let the glyphs shown here speak for themselves…

The term “earlyposthuman” spans both these realms, a semi- fictional zone that persists between the revelation of the Shittite Heresies and that imminent moment when our soft sculpture finally hits the fan. Here we find items as mundane as a horoscope and as cosmologically tainted as instructions for planetary evacuation.

Click Here for Frequently Asked Questions about Art. Yes, it’s true that transcription errors have occurred between inner and outer space. But much of the true story is still discernable within these images.

Hermeneutic
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 37” x 56”

I had already been using drugs and so I began taking drugs even more to relieve the paint.
This time, I threw everything I had onto the canvas. God spoke to me again and said," Whatever thou paint shall be true!" Just then, He filled me with the holy Ghost! With tears running down my cheeks, I began painting in tongues.
I arrived home about 3:00 a.m. and told my wife everything that had happened to me, word for word, as she can attest.

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What comes after Z?
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 37” x 56”

How can we possibly evoke the new with no tools at our disposal but our existing alphabet and vocabulary? Doctor Seuss seems to speak of a similar conundrum in his classic treatise, "What comes after Z?" As much as any of the other explanations offered here, “Z” may actually be the genesis of my longtime desire to bring these strange character sets and their associated animals to life. Here we reintroduce the Glass Bead Game, grow Concepts By Accretion.

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Pedagogical Exercises / Self-Schemata
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 47” x 48”

It all started rather tamely decades ago, with sketchbooks full of abstract line drawings exploring the relation of shape and repetition, like Paul Klee’s “Pedagogical Sketchbook,” from which I took my working title. In my case, a glutinous distillation of the weird has resulted from the low heat of thousands of versions and variations. It’s just gotten out of hand.

Taking the material from small drawings to larger paintings added complexity. The paintings set up a shallow space where tensions across a number of formal but unusual dimensions are arrayed, between open and enclosed, opaque and overlapping, real and symbolic, unfinished and complete. A variety of painterly concerns—scale, color, value--provide additional depth.

The term “Self-Schemata,” maybe that refers to the alambic vessels into which the weird spirits are drawn on line 2, maybe to the red row of faceless placeworkers above.

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Musica
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 37” x 45”

A concert. Riffing on musical notation, thinking about painting on black velvet.

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Horoscope, maybe yours, maybe mine too
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 37” x 51”

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Earlyposthuman fetishes
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 38” x 54”

cellular division;
spores;
sublimation;
sexual thermodynamics;
sprouts.

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Alien Transmission
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 38” x 56”

In the movie “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers” replacement townspeople curdle from the soufflé interiors of interstellar seed pods, soon absorbing enough of the details of speech and behavior to pass for any of us in regular life…

The fear of the foetus that came out of this first alien beachhead is still with us in society’s endless wrangling about stem cell differentiation, veal, and mushrooms. Here a team of extraterrestrial podlings drift to their assignments in Contra Costa County, each optimized for effective information transfer. Don’t look behind you…

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4JZ
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 35” x 57”

Just as Dr. Zeier had promised, every new painting became better, more “fluent,” as the therapy continued and my augmented language centers begin to fire on their own. After only six weeks, the CAT scans showed a substantially enlarged medulla, the new stem cells growing well.

At this point I had already processed multiple messages from departed kin, past identities, god, what-have-you, John Malkovich, and the math guy that worked for the CIA in his garage.

Ironically, until this final series of injections, I had never channeled JZ himself. Three sessions are represented here:

o Better Baroques, “acid-baroque” without the acid.
o Headline, read all about it!
o Chromosomy, with homage to the crazy creatures in Stephen Jay Gould’s “Wonderful Life”

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