Space, Tension, Relaxation by Emily Taylor

The Pomona College Museum of Art’s current exhibit is a group show, featuring the work of the Pomona College Studio Art faculty members. Mark Allen, Sandeep Mukherjee, Sheila Pinkel, and Mercedes Teixido are each represented.
When you walk into the gallery, you are confronted by two very different bodies of work that are similar only in scale. However, an intricate relationship between the works is formed when the organic, cosmological paintings by Sandeep Mukherjee face the activist photo compositions by Sheila Pinkel.

In this first room, you are confronted by opposing modes of experiencing the world. Mukherjee’s work uses natural colors-greens, blues, blacks, and reds-to reference cosmology and landscapes. The viewer becomes more aware of the physical world—that is, the unchanging part, untouched by man. On the opposite wall are pieces that show the human influence on the world. This can be seen in the subject-matter as well as the style and production of the work. The piece uses text, photos, and an actual prison bed.

One of Pinkel’s pieces is a large graph that shows the fluctuations in prison populations in the United States over the last seventy years. Pinkel also displays a triptych comprised of large photographs of dollar bills in a 9x9 lattice. The middle bill in the lattice shows a prisoner in a cell; the outside bills quote statistics on prison labor and the costs of our prison system. Pinkel’s work demands the viewer to think critically about prison and incarceration in this country. This potent political message is heightened by its juxtaposition with Mukherjee’s paintings.

As stated, Mukherjee’s paintings reference cosmological bodies, landscape, and space. While Pinkel’s paintings encourage a straight-foward consideration of the world in which we live, Mukherjee’s paintings take a different approach. His luminescent orbs and repetitive arcs are meditative in a manner that compels you to stop, pause, and take in the painting. Later, you begin to wonder about the geometries and symmetries and that exist in the world. You are lost in the painting, observing the meticulous application of color that did not originate with a brush stroke, nor was it machine-made.

The spirals are hand-painted, and the use of the body to create something so complex and intricate helps you visualize how the microcosmic can become the macrocosmic, how one man can become a people, and how one mark, if repeated, can create a universe. The use of scale, and the relationship of the miniscule to the immeasurable is essential to this work.
The second room of the show contains work by Mark Allen and Mercedes Teixido. If the first room is a commentary about the world in which we live on a grand scale, the second room is about the private parts of the world, and the nurturing aspect of nature. Whereas Pinkel created a jail cell in the first room by taping off a square on the floor, Mark Allen created the Phone Booth, another cell-like area, as a place to be secluded and isolated, but still connected to the rest of the world and to nature.
The phone booth is a small greenhouse set up on one side of the room. You enter through a sliding door, and receive instructions to spray the plants with water, sit down in the conveniently placed chair, and use the telephone to call a certain number. Depending on the day, a different person answers and either sings a song, tells a trivia fact, recites a poem, plays a musical instrument, or something of that nature. When you sit down to use the phone, it is not only an obligation to listen to the person on the opposite end, but you are then stuck for a moment, attached to this phone, hanging from a cord, on a desk, in the greenhouse. There is something strangely intimate about having someone perform a song or poem across a telephone. The first time I went in, a girl sang a song she had written about plants. I didn’t know what to do when it was over. Should I clap? Hang up? Start a conversation? It was actually very unclear.

The phone booth is a disorienting experience because the greenhouse is very humid and crowded with plants. Fitting two people is somewhat uncomfortable, and it seems obvious that it is meant for solitary experience. It is a transition into a jungle environment, with the exception of the parlor room feel generated by the chair and phone.
You can’t help being soothed and calmed by the plants, the humidity, and the voice on the other end of the phone, but the relaxed and informal experience feels out of place in an art museum. Allen’s piece creates a tension between a personal and a public place.

Mercedes Teixido’s two bodies of work also exhibit a unique personal touch. Her set of paintings reference nature and creation, but in a very different manner than Mukherjee or Allen’s work. The paintings are very process-oriented. Teixido came up with rules to govern their creation. They are made with opaque watercolors, and each piece starts with a larger organic body, which was allowed to flow and get somewhat “out of control.” She overlaid and extended this with tiny controlled circles or dots, also of condensed opaque watercolor.

The theme of nature and growth complements Mark Allen’s Phone Booth (which contains real growing plants). A tension between control and freedom is also present in Teixido’s work, because the pieces were created by allowing the paint to flow and be free, and also by using the paint in a very restricted way.

Teixido’s second body of work is a series of drawings. These bring personal spaces into a public space, as well. Teixido refers to this set of drawings as her memory drawings. She tried to think of all the places that she has ever slept, and then she drew them on somewhat small pieces of paper with hard pencils. The accumulation of drawings is like the accumulation of memories. Some are more intricate than others, but all are finished with a very delicate and intimate feel.

This series is probably the last set of drawings one sees in the exhibit because it is on the far wall in the second room. This is fitting, because where else do you end up at the end of the day but in bed?

On the way out of the museum, you again pass by the prison bed that is a part of Pinkel’s work. After seeing the intimately conveyed beds in Teixido’s work, the stark unfriendly small prison bed is even more effective as a statement about the living conditions in US prisons.

Each faculty-member of the Pomona College Studio Art Department has a very distinctive style and medium. In this case, their work fits together in a cohesive show that deals with the natural versus the man-made world and the tension between public and private spaces. This allows the viewer to confront each body of work in relation to the others, heightening the effect of each. Juxtaposing relaxing personal spaces and disquieting public spaces, the faculty art show illustrates each artist’s unique mode of representing reality.

The show opened on September 2nd, and will be up until October 19th, 2008.