Enigmatic Spaces: Mara Metcalf, Kristin Street, and Tina Tryforos
The Chazan Gallery at Wheeler • Providence, RI • chazangallery.org • Through November 10, 2021
Chain link melts into thread as it draws together moments of a just-discernable urban landscape in Mara Metcalf’s Almost Anywhere Stringer, 2021. This making-visible of often unseen or unnoticed liminal spaces is where the work of Metcalf, Kristin Street, and Tina Tryforos overlaps. Though each artist’s technique and point of departure is distinct, all three invite us to consider more closely our relationship to these eponymous enigmatic spaces.
When Tryforos was confronted with her cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment, she began using the photographic process of chemigrams in her prints, often used in medical imaging’s oblique capacity to see into the body. The medical, yet poetic, term “architectural distortion,” a group of cells that doesn’t present as a visible mass and is yet significant, inspired her consideration of the ways we identity and treat disease, “both corporeal and societal.” She works in turns with chemical exposure and etching on varnished photo paper to examine the dynamic of the “natural” world inevitably shaped by human intervention. Indeed the shapes and colors that manifest in her images are completely contingent upon the content of the choice of paper and varnish, as is evident in the titles of prints like Seagullwarmtone N.WN+MSA, 2019. The luminous, abstracted prints present in a beautiful and nuanced array of shifting textures and tones that point to her thoughtful descriptions of the relinquishing of control that can be part of creating and exhibiting abstract forms, let alone enduring opaque and seemingly arbitrary cancer treatment.
This human mediation is also at play in Street’s process-oriented images, as in Interconnections, 2021: one of three large-scale translucent and double-sided works. These larger hanging pieces and her smaller framed drawings simultaneously invite and deter our reading. Their intrinsic depth and dimensionality point to her background as a textile artist. Defying the conventional two-dimensionality of drawing, Street’s exploration begins with and then transcends the illusion of space as she layers marks upon marks, each informing the next in an unfolding of the space: “even if they are ‘only’ lines on paper, every mark depicts a front and back and divides light and dark, figure and ground.” Both the unpredictable yet responsive process of her drawing and her consideration of the migratory patterns of birds give the works a near vibrating quality.
Metcalf encourages a similar kind of deep, sensory looking, grounded in her own observation of the natural world. Her meditative walking practice has carried her through life, the Pacific Northwest to New England, and especially during the challenges of COVID. Drawing, she remarks, is all about touching. Her additive process (in some cases collaged xerox transfers, in others she quite literally stitches together the elements of her “drawings”), builds an urban landscape at once distant and familiar. Yet rather than attempting to unravel these liminal moments, she seeks to bring them together, to explore what beauty lives in the imperfection of these oft-overlooked spaces. This quality of bringing together is palpable in the exhibition —there is a lovely resonance that echoes between the three distinctive bodies of works. Each decidedly their own technique, approach, and texture, they nonetheless speak to each other in a mutually illuminating way. Explore what hidden meanings might arise for you in the space between.
– Elizabeth Maynard