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Sally Kuzma: Seed Cycles
Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum
2220 N. Terrace Ave.
www.cavtmuseums.org
Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m.
Admission $5/$3 students and seniors
Through April 6
Reviewed by Debra Brehmer
Posted March 4, 2008. Sally Kuzma, a native New Yorker, had been living in
Brooklyn and actively pursuing her life as an artist when her husband was
transferred to Iowa. With no experience of the Midwest, Kuzma set her sights on
this new destination with dread. She was pleasantly surprised, however, by what
she found there: fields, prairies and an opportunity to take long walks and study
handfuls of milkweed seed. Kuzma, who has a master’s degree in art from the
State University of New York-Stony Brook, had spent most of her art career
making drawings, but had also been employed in New York as a graphic
designer.
In Iowa, Kuzma had the time and space to return to a full-time art practice. On her
walks in the country, she’d pluck handfuls of thistle or sumac and bring them back
to the studio. She hadn’t been drawing for a while and felt hesitant to begin again.
So instead she threw some plants she had collected on her scanner bed and
copied the image into her computer. What she found was interesting. Leaving the
scanner door off allowed whatever the light conditions were in her studio to create
random color affects in the background of the images. She began to experiment
with scanned images and during her five years in Iowa, developed increasingly
elaborate modes of doubling and rotating the plants through Adobe Photoshop.
Four years ago, her husband was transferred again, this time to Milwaukee where
Kuzma now resides. The current exhibition of her work at Villa Terrace includes
about 40 images from her Iowa work, called “Seed Cycles.” What is interesting
about these mostly large-scale C-prints and Giclee on rag paper images is their
elegance. Kuzma imposes her own design strategies on the plant parts yet
maintains enough of their essential “truth” to provide a rather balanced
collaboration between man/woman and nature. There are some images, such as
Corn in Four Parts: Ear, where she simply rolls the ear of corn across the scanner
bed as the light is passing over it, creating a series of blurred corn cobs. Here, the
intervention is minimal, yet through the distortions of the repeating image we share
her wonderment over the texture and pattern of the corn kernel growth. The
mechanical tool of the scanner provides a differentiated “seeing” process for us,
one that mimics the way the human eye might survey an object, but more
methodically breaks the seeing process into sequences. In another image from this
series featuring a few graceful strands of corn silk, the artist’s intervention turns
these pieces of silk into powerful conduits, almost like electrical wires. Kuzma
commented in a lecture that she was amazed to learn that every strand of silk that
tops an ear of corn is directly connected to a kernel and is necessary for the
pollination of the ear.
When she turns her attention to wild flowers like Bottle Gentian or lilies, we again
share in the artist’s process of investigation and discovery. She is taking the time
to look at these things that grow around her new Iowa home and using the
technology of the computer to pick them apart, see how they work and play with
the patterns that emerge from repeating their forms. It’s very much a Leonardo da
Vinci tactic. Leonardo made hundreds, maybe thousands of drawings in his
sketchbooks, examining how birds fly, the pathways of water, the patterns of rain
drops, the human nerve system. He had to do it all directly from hand and eye.
Kuzma uses the computer, a machine, to investigate the wonders of nature. The
risk here is that her images look like cold, machine-generated samples. But they
don’t. Kuzma is a skilled artist and technician who is highly conscious of what she’
s doing which is ultimately making works of art. She insists that they speak both
formally as works of art and conceptually as philosophical inquiries into the
nature of form and growth. And the beauty of the images is that they occupy both
spheres very nicely.
In Iowa, almost as validation of her profound new interest in soy beans and corn
fields, Kuzma discovered a kindred spirit: the famous modern architect Louis
Sullivan (1856-1924), who had designed a bank in the town of Grinnell, Iowa, in
1914. Louis Sullivan, who lived in Chicago and is known as the father of modern
architecture, looked to plant life for patterns to incorporate on his building
facades. Sullivan wrote several books on what he termed “organic architecture,”
insisting that all designers needed to reconcile the forces of nature and science.
His famous dictum “form follows function” seems to have generated the spirit of
Kuzma’s artistic and scientific investigations of the patterns and shared structures
of plants.
But then again, Kuzma is not working within the same cultural conditions as
Sullivan. Now, as more and more plants are genetically “adjusted” any artistic
process that hints of the laboratory carries some voltage of aberration or maybe
fear and loss. Kuzma doesn’t shy away from those concerns and all of her images
do have a slightly distancing whiff of the Petri dish. But they also hold up in their
beauty and form which gives her work a lingering resonance.
Debra Brehmer is a Milwaukee-based art historian, director of Portrait Society
Gallery, and co-publisher of Susceptible to Images.
Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum
2220 N. Terrace Ave.
www.cavtmuseums.org
Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m.
Admission $5/$3 students and seniors
Through April 6
Reviewed by Debra Brehmer
Posted March 4, 2008. Sally Kuzma, a native New Yorker, had been living in
Brooklyn and actively pursuing her life as an artist when her husband was
transferred to Iowa. With no experience of the Midwest, Kuzma set her sights on
this new destination with dread. She was pleasantly surprised, however, by what
she found there: fields, prairies and an opportunity to take long walks and study
handfuls of milkweed seed. Kuzma, who has a master’s degree in art from the
State University of New York-Stony Brook, had spent most of her art career
making drawings, but had also been employed in New York as a graphic
designer.
In Iowa, Kuzma had the time and space to return to a full-time art practice. On her
walks in the country, she’d pluck handfuls of thistle or sumac and bring them back
to the studio. She hadn’t been drawing for a while and felt hesitant to begin again.
So instead she threw some plants she had collected on her scanner bed and
copied the image into her computer. What she found was interesting. Leaving the
scanner door off allowed whatever the light conditions were in her studio to create
random color affects in the background of the images. She began to experiment
with scanned images and during her five years in Iowa, developed increasingly
elaborate modes of doubling and rotating the plants through Adobe Photoshop.
Four years ago, her husband was transferred again, this time to Milwaukee where
Kuzma now resides. The current exhibition of her work at Villa Terrace includes
about 40 images from her Iowa work, called “Seed Cycles.” What is interesting
about these mostly large-scale C-prints and Giclee on rag paper images is their
elegance. Kuzma imposes her own design strategies on the plant parts yet
maintains enough of their essential “truth” to provide a rather balanced
collaboration between man/woman and nature. There are some images, such as
Corn in Four Parts: Ear, where she simply rolls the ear of corn across the scanner
bed as the light is passing over it, creating a series of blurred corn cobs. Here, the
intervention is minimal, yet through the distortions of the repeating image we share
her wonderment over the texture and pattern of the corn kernel growth. The
mechanical tool of the scanner provides a differentiated “seeing” process for us,
one that mimics the way the human eye might survey an object, but more
methodically breaks the seeing process into sequences. In another image from this
series featuring a few graceful strands of corn silk, the artist’s intervention turns
these pieces of silk into powerful conduits, almost like electrical wires. Kuzma
commented in a lecture that she was amazed to learn that every strand of silk that
tops an ear of corn is directly connected to a kernel and is necessary for the
pollination of the ear.
When she turns her attention to wild flowers like Bottle Gentian or lilies, we again
share in the artist’s process of investigation and discovery. She is taking the time
to look at these things that grow around her new Iowa home and using the
technology of the computer to pick them apart, see how they work and play with
the patterns that emerge from repeating their forms. It’s very much a Leonardo da
Vinci tactic. Leonardo made hundreds, maybe thousands of drawings in his
sketchbooks, examining how birds fly, the pathways of water, the patterns of rain
drops, the human nerve system. He had to do it all directly from hand and eye.
Kuzma uses the computer, a machine, to investigate the wonders of nature. The
risk here is that her images look like cold, machine-generated samples. But they
don’t. Kuzma is a skilled artist and technician who is highly conscious of what she’
s doing which is ultimately making works of art. She insists that they speak both
formally as works of art and conceptually as philosophical inquiries into the
nature of form and growth. And the beauty of the images is that they occupy both
spheres very nicely.
In Iowa, almost as validation of her profound new interest in soy beans and corn
fields, Kuzma discovered a kindred spirit: the famous modern architect Louis
Sullivan (1856-1924), who had designed a bank in the town of Grinnell, Iowa, in
1914. Louis Sullivan, who lived in Chicago and is known as the father of modern
architecture, looked to plant life for patterns to incorporate on his building
facades. Sullivan wrote several books on what he termed “organic architecture,”
insisting that all designers needed to reconcile the forces of nature and science.
His famous dictum “form follows function” seems to have generated the spirit of
Kuzma’s artistic and scientific investigations of the patterns and shared structures
of plants.
But then again, Kuzma is not working within the same cultural conditions as
Sullivan. Now, as more and more plants are genetically “adjusted” any artistic
process that hints of the laboratory carries some voltage of aberration or maybe
fear and loss. Kuzma doesn’t shy away from those concerns and all of her images
do have a slightly distancing whiff of the Petri dish. But they also hold up in their
beauty and form which gives her work a lingering resonance.
Debra Brehmer is a Milwaukee-based art historian, director of Portrait Society
Gallery, and co-publisher of Susceptible to Images.
| Copyright 2008 Art History Chicks LLC |
| Corn in Frour Parts: Silk |
| Corn in Four Parts: Husk |
| Corn in Four Parts: Ear |
| Top: Prairieseed Rotation Spiderwort Dark Bottom: Prairieseed Rotation Spiderwort Light |