Marie Watt installation at Tacoma Art Museum
Engine, 2009. Felted wool, wood, audio/visual presentation, 108 x 240 x 162 inches. In collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. |
by Alec Clayton
The Weekly Volcano, Aug. 2, 2012
Marie Watt brings
blankets, stories and communities to Tacoma Art Museum
The
announcements for Marie Watt’s installation “Lodge” at Tacoma Art Museum did not
paint a clear enough picture to make me want to see the show, but I went nevertheless.
I will try to state it a little more clearly:
Go.
See this show. Now.
Does
that clarify it?
Watt,
who grew up in Redmond, is a Seneca Indian. Her art grows out of Native
traditions with influences from conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. The focal point
of her installation is a piece called “engine,” which is a two-room, cave-like
lodge made of felted wool stretched over frames of bent wood — her artistic
interpretation of the lodges in which the Seneca traditionally gathered in
small groups to listen to story tellers.
Visitors
to the museum can go into the lodge. The walls of the front room are covered
with colorful hand prints representing the hands of the community members who
helped build the lodge. The second room is a warm and inviting cave-like
structure with felt-covered seating areas and felt-covered stalactites and
stalagmites. An opening on top lets light in and there is an audio/visual
projection on the inner walls of a story teller. Sitting inside is like sitting
around a campfire with a few of your closest of friends. It is an otherworldly,
moving and welcoming experience.
Watt
recalls that when she was in kindergarten she told her classmates, “I was part
cowboy and part Indian.” Her mother was Seneca and grew up on the Cattaraugus
Reservation in upstate New York.
“We
traditionally call ourselves Haudenosaunee, which is often summarized as
‘people of the long house, Watt says. “My collective work is about house
building — not literally constructing
architecture, but instead the bits and pieces, the component parts, and a
foundation of stories and objects that recall skins and the ways in which we
know comfort, shelter, home.”
In
addition to the lodge, Watt has filled the gallery with sculptural works made
primarily of blankets stacked high (and bronze and resin sculptures based on
stacks of blankets). The blankets tell stories, and in some of the works the
stories are handwritten on tags attached to the blankets. A museum docent
pointed out to me a particular blanket layered within a stack of old blankets
piled eight-feet high. It was a blanket issued to a holocaust survivor when he
was first sent to the concentration camp. The handwritten tags tell the tale of
how he carried that blanket with him throughout his ordeal of imprisonment.
The
gallery walls are lined with prints and woven or quilted wall hangings, some of
which tell personal and historic stories and some of which abstractly interpret
history and traditions. Many of the minimalist abstract prints are particularly
beautiful. And the more narrative works pay homage to historical figures
ranging from the Native American athlete Jim Thorpe to labor leaders like Ira
Hayes to feminist pioneers such as Susan B. Anthony and Mary Cady Stanton.
Visitors
should take the time to carefully read all of the informative wall texts.
To once
more make myself clear: Go. See this show. Now.
[Tacoma Art Museum, Wed.–Sun. 10 a.m. to
5 p.m., Third Thursdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., through Oct. 7, admission $10, student/senior/military
$8, children 5 and younger free, Third Thursdays free from 5-8 p.m.,1701
Pacific Avenue, Tacoma]
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