Annette Lemieux, “Unfinished Business”
Look Again: Annette Lemieux, “Unfinished Business” Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University. February 14 – April 1, 2012
“Unfinished Business,” Annette Lemieux’s exhibition at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, is striking in its minimal elegance but rich in quirky touches. Conceived as a counterpoint to her recent traveling retrospective, it does not claim a comprehensive scope. But it does present a subtly condensed statement of wide-ranging interests, realized in disparate forms that confound traditional notions of style. The curator of this exhibition is Lelia Amalfitano, but the curator of the work itself is Lemieux, in that it emerges from a complex process of research and collecting.
Downstairs in the Carpenter Center lobby, visitors are quite literally greeted by the wall installation Hellos and Goodbyes, made up of a series of photographic blow-ups of waving hands. No question these are appropriated fragments, with visible grain, or even enlarged half-tone dots – but the original setting is left open, since in some a cheerful greeting is potentially indistinguishable from more formal salutes, including the infamous Nazi version. A second work presents an equally innocent initial appearance. In Back to the Garden, toy farm animals and their human attendants are arrayed across the surface of a shallow green circular labyrinth (based on one inscribed in the floor of Chartres Cathedral) that also suggests some sort of board game without apparent rules, leading to a barren tree at the center.
[wowslider id=”29″]
The exhibition’s impetus includes not only the activity of looking back that Lemieux undertook while planning her 2010 retrospective, but also a studio move the same year that displaced her from a space she had occupied for two decades. The second part of the exhibition, presented upstairs in the Sert Gallery, is focused on a series of objects that she unearthed during this process – some she had collected herself, others received as gifts.
The title of Things to walk away with is definitely not meant to be taken literally – that much is made clear by the presence of an attendant, sitting at an old-style school desk, with an equally vintage lamp and chair, at the end of the space. The gridded arrangement of 96 objects incorporates lines inscribed in Le Corbusier’s cement floor, finding within that pattern a configuration that evokes a subtle Latin cross, and once again Chartres, this time the proportions of the cathedral’s floor plan.
Most of the objects appear to be readymade, or at least not created by the artist. But found hardly equals unrelated, either to one another or to various threads in Lemieux’s work. One subset is, appropriately enough, crosses: Latin crosses, on a pair of elegant, presumably ecclesiastical gloves, the international red cross symbol incorporated into “S.O.S. the international auto trouble flasher,” still in its package, or its reverse, a white cross on a red field as part of a stack of fabric (with a U.S. flag faintly visible through the lighter area). There are also several different types of globes (including a globe mechanical calendar and globe pencil sharpener), which intersect in one direction with other maps, and in another with different spherical objects, including one identifiable from the relief lettering on top as a “super ball antenna,” and even an anatomical eyeball model. Various protective hats and helmets evoke the role this motif has played in Lemieux’s work, while also connecting to a hatbox, which is a bridge to other containers, including a wooden case, a small suit case, and a crate with “united farmers” printed on the side. A plaid insole, still in its packaging, relates to various pairs of shoes, both vintage and decorative (i.e., tourist-style wooden clogs), as well as a couple of lone hooves, fashioned into vessels, which in turn could connect to certain non-organic containers, or to a bizarre lamp with a four-hoof base. A brick with a double row of cylindrical holes evokes the repeated appearance of this building block in Lemieux’s work while having formal links to other perforated geometric objects throughout the array.
Nothing here is particularly new, and indeed the charming obsolescence will potentially appeal to anyone who comes across the work. Spend a bit of time, and connections become apparent, while those with more background information can see how these found objects relate to themes that run throughout Lemieux’s work. One also imagines a whole collection of stories, not only from Lemieux, but from many previous owners whose connections have been lost.
Lemieux’s work is deeply involved with a play with forms and images that are to varying degrees taken up, translated, appropriated, or juxtaposed. This show demonstrates how little distinction remains between making and simply finding. Things to walk away with achieves the notable feat of a miniature retrospective, with the scope of the artist’s interests conveyed not by the work she has produced over her substantial career, but through the strongly related objects that accrued in the corners of her studio.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Martha Buskirk is Professor of art history and criticism at Montserrat College of Art. Her new book, Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace, is forthcoming from Continuum in April.