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"Strange Fascination: New Sculpture by Julia Couzens," is a sprawling, near-gothic accretion of accumulated "junk" that is both installation and performance. It spreads "parasitically" across floors, walls and ventilation ducts, and reveals a continuously changing face, owing to periodic revisions by the artist over a three-month run at the Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento. It’s Technicolor jumble cum jungle. Spread out across a compact, low-ceilinged space, Couzens’ raw materials (steel cages, yarn, electrical tape, cloth, lighting fixtures, pipe cleaners, fabric, crocheted blankets and doilies) reveal an obsessive, hyperactive working process whose apparent governing principle is to resist any force (read: intellect) that might dictate a predetermined outcome. Couzens, one of the region’s most accomplished artists, has intellect to spare, but she’s is adamant that her art not be "about anything." "Art is a barricade to the act of making," she says, quoting Terry Allen. But like many process artists who work intuitively with found (i.e. non-art) materials — Jessica Stockholder, Annette Messenger and Judy Pfaff are a few influences that come to mind — Couzens readily concedes that materials and objects carry their own charges, and that the working process often reveals unarticulated thoughts and emotions. That’s certainly the case here. But unlike previous Couzens exhibits where references to the body and to nature prevailed, these works, even with their allusions to natural forms, push right up to the edge of topicality, with symbols of domesticity and femininity abounding.
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The centerpiece, "Insomnia", pulls viewers in with a black negligee suspended from the wall in the shape of a witch’s cap. Midair, it connects — via a bra-shaped piece of fabric — to a highly ornamented chandelier that rests on the floor like an anchor. The object is wrapped so thoroughly in tape that it appears to be painted — black. Add to that, cords of brightly hued electrical tape and bits of cloth and you have something that borders on fetishistic. What’s striking is how each of these elements is transformed into its opposite: An otherwise sexy night gown becomes an outsize piece of Halloween garb; a light fixture becomes a weight, sunk by the artist’s Rococo excess. Strangely, I felt as if the piece could become self animating a la Tinguely and dissolve in a puff of smoke. The difference of course, is that the noise you hear isn’t mechanical, but a kind of psychic clanging in your head. Similar inversions of meaning take place in "Strange Fascination," the show’s title piece. It’s a thicket of crushed metal cages crudely wrapped in colored yarns to which a crocheted blanket was later appended and twisted into the shape of a figure with bound feet. To that point-blank (and wholly self-explanatory blast at suburban domesticity) Couzens added a small collection of crocheted bottle caps which she found in a thrift store. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more blatant example of craft run amok. Obsession, as evidenced by Couzens’ repeated use of yarn and tape to wrap nearly everything, is what gives this exhibition its nervous, animating force. It’s a force that seems to call into question conventional meanings by linking the component parts of each piece in metaphorical chains of causality.
Take, for example, the metal garden gate that is the focal point of "Untitled 2005". Like the chandelier in "Insomnia," it, too, is wrapped in black cloth tape. Far more ominously, Couzens attaches an ungainly assemblage of yarn and cloth that looks, literally, like a home-spun malignancy. Beneath, on the floor, rests a heap of multi-colored fabric swatches known as tulle – the diaphanous stuff teen-age ballerinas wear. Just don’t look for any Sugar Plum Fairies in this not-so-sweet home.
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Couzens isn’t always trying to tear the smiling face off life’s surfaces. Sometimes sheer beauty suffices. "Before the Glorious" is a small, delicate, wall-mounted construction of hair-thin wire that looks like a wisp of smoke. It is a throwback to an earlier period in which organic abstraction – particularly references to dense foliage in the Sacramento Delta — played a more central role in Couzens practice. Another reminder of Couzens’ lighter side is an untitled "drawing" made from tiny bits of orange tape on notebook paper. The pieces are arrayed in a mandala-like fashion, a code to be deciphered, but also savored for its pure, lyrical quality. As a child growing up in Auburn, Couzens spent a lot of time outdoors "digging," she says, "for China." Now, in the same spot, caring for an aging parent, the two sit side by side on a sofa. One cross-stitches; the other wraps found objects in yarn, tape and electrical wire with no apparent sense of irony. The mother’s obsession is self-contained and oriented to completing a specific task. Couzens’ operates unconsciously, directing her energy outward — "Pushing my way through a thicket, hard in my position" is how she describes it. That act, in and of itself, summarizes as well as anything, the sort of material alchemy that has always been at the center of Couzens’ art. Think of it as surrealism without a manifesto. Peter Stegall’s work couldn’t provide a sharper contrast. A painter who’s leaned toward shiny, alluring surfaces and shapes that recall Matisse cutouts, Stegall is a formalist to the core. Weight, balance, form, spacial relationships and especially color, are his paramount concerns, and in "Paintings and Constructions," he proves just how well he can juggle those elements. The paintings, most of them about a foot square, are highly seductive owing to gloss enamel paint. Problem is, these flat, brilliantly colored surfaces don’t always give viewers a way in, even though in larger works Stegall warps the forms to add dimensionality. His 3-D constructions — enamel-coated, wall-mounted, wood pieces, also about a foot square – tell a different story. They look like models for the kind of massive steel sculptures seen public spaces. The advantage, here, at this intimate size, is that you can really see the artist’s thinking. It’s a potent synthesis of Constructivist shapes and multi-colored lines of the sort favored by Sol Lewitt. The lines appear as stacked grids, and are interrupted by various shapes (triangles, circles, half-circles, squares and biomorphic shapes and lines) that cast provocative shadows. Whether they’re an overt nod to painter Elizabeth Murray or a wry comment on the act of painting itself is hard to tell. What’s clear is that Stegall’s acute attention to detail and his mastery of form, color and balance are things to behold when he expresses himself three-dimensionally. Here’s hoping he gets the opportunity to do so on a much larger scale.
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"Strange Fascination: New Sculpture by Julia Couzens" and "Paintings and Constructions" by Peter Stegall closed February 26 at the Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento.
