Review: Still Tangled
After many hours of careful assemblage, “Still Tangled” debuted at Studios Inc on August's First Friday, 2024. The exhibition showcases work by former artist in residence Susan White, and revists her 2021 solo exhibition “The Untangling”. Locally harvested honey locust thorns are scattered across the room in heaps and strung up above the ceiling. The thorns are painted in many colors; gold, silver, red, white, and blue. Accompanying them are pyrographs made up of thousands of tiny dots, holes meditatively burned into paper. Using a wood-burning tool, the artist strategically burns small holes into the thorns and sticks them together like pieces of a puzzle. Tension is the glue, although sometimes actual wood glue comes in handy.
While sharp and potentially destructive, there is also beauty to the thorns. When young, the branches are an olive green, and slowly turn a mahogany brown as they mature. The geometry of the branches is eye-catching with the branches twirling around each other as if performing lyrical dance. In her piece Hope, thorns painted silver are tangled around an interior chain that holds the pieces together. Originally named Cloud, the name was changed to Hope as an example of something small that has the potential to grow. This idea is amplified by the large shadow the piece casts behind itself.
However, it's the frustration and fragility of the American social and political climate that comes to the forefront of the exhibition through Susan’s Flag series. Susan has created six different installments of her sculpture Flag. This piece has been exhibited in Como, Italy, and throughout Kansas City. The first iteration of the sculpture, Untitled (Flag), was exhibited in 2012 alongside work by Jung A Woo in a show called “I Am An American”, addressing what makes a “real” American. Now in its sixth stage, Flag VI sits deconstructed, with each color in its respective piles on the floor.. Held together without wire, take one wrong step and it could all fall apart.
Flag VI, 2024
Susan’s piece The Hope Line is different from the other hanging sculptures; it doesn’t have an interior chain supporting the branches. For each iteration of the sculpture the artist intricately rebuilds it, hanging each thorn together. The fact that the sculpture stays intact after each time it is constructed is a testament to just how strong hope can be. A pyrograph by the same name hangs beside the sculpture. To create her pyrograph works, the artist uses the tip of a wood-burning tool to burn thousands of tiny dots into the paper. Susan thinks about the constant chatter that accompanies our minds and sees her pyrographs as distilling that sound to a meditative hum. The overwhelming noise of our lives calmed, dot by dot.
To the right of The Hope Line pyrograph lies a suite of five pyrographs hung together titled Chant of the Prayer Flags I-V. The Flint Hills serve as inspiration for these works. Driving back and forth between her home, friends' homes, and art centers, Susan began to feel an appreciation of the drive’s repetitive nature and the calm, almost meditative state that comes from it. Another thought came to her during this time and that was of the prayer flags of Tibet. Everytime the wind blows, it sends the message from the flag into the heavens. It is the acknowledgement of these moments, and all of the other extraordinary moments life gives us that fuel these works on paper.
Susan’s work is a celebration of patience, life experiences (the good and the bad), and the beauty of nature. Don’t miss the conversation: “Still Tangled” is on view at Studios Inc through September 28th, 2024.