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This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
“Every Stage of Becoming,” Jessica Caldas’ exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, is comprised of large-scale soft sculptures — visual manifestos about mothers, daughters and women.
The featured figure, an abstract, pillowy sculpture stuffed with polyester fiberfill, has elongated limbs and a bulbous torso sheathed in burgundy, rose, red and purple fabrics. This figure, who represents all women, is the main character, the hero of the artist’s narrative.
Caldas’ sculptural bodies do not stand. They hang. They curl up on floors. They become rugs to lie on. It is impossible not to feel the exhaustion of these female forms whose elongated legs and pillow-like bodies become metaphorical beds for resting the weary vessel of the female body.
The life-size domestic scenes in which they appear are theatrical. Like a processional medieval play, the viewer moves from one station to the next as the narrative builds. The domestic interiors in which the drama unfolds are composed of found objects reconfigured into new artifacts.
We hear a lot about the performance aspect of visual art. While other artists only allude to the performative aspect of their work, Caldas succeeds brilliantly in showing her physical process as part of the work, allowing the viewer to see what has taken place.
Credit: Courtesy of Clint Fuller
Credit: Courtesy of Clint Fuller
“No one ever really knows except the mother II (Merope & Epicaste)” is presented as an interior window with long burgundy and purple curtains hung over a grid of nine photos that show the process of the piece’s making. Each photo occupies a panel of the gridded window, and each shows the artist engaging with her own work.
Caldas’ art resides in the canon of women artists who have addressed female sexuality, their bodies and their physicality within a dramatic and transformative idiom that leans toward surrealism.
Her installations create a narrative space much like the cycles of the Greek myths that the artist references in her titles. Each title is a quotation from a troubled female archetype such as Clytemnestra, Helen, Jocasta, Circe or Eurydice — women whose stories are filled with conflict and drama. Clytemnestra murders her husband. Helen indirectly causes the Trojan war. Jocasta is the mother of Oedipus, whom she unknowingly marries. Tragedies all. These women just cannot win.
Through references to these female giants of Greek mythology, Caldas correlates the artistic process with birthing, mothering and the physical pathos of the female body.
Credit: Courtesy of DeDe Ajavon
Credit: Courtesy of DeDe Ajavon
“I could not both live and still be a statue (Galatea & Paphos)” incorporates used house linens, structures fabricated from gifted furniture, plaster, beads, polyester fiberfill, fake pearls, found light fixtures and acrylic paint. The title refers to Ovid’s “Metamorphosis,” in which the artist Pygmalion creates a sculpture, called Galatea, that comes to life.
Is this a meditation on the birthing process or the practice of creating as an artist? Are there parallels between the physical process making of art and the life of a woman artist in her roles as mother, daughter and woman? Galatea gives birth to her son, Paphos, after she is transformed from a sculpture into a real woman. Is it art or is it love that has given her life so that she might create?
Such questions could be a path into Caldas’ process at her July 20 artist talk at MOCA GA.
EXHIBIT REVIEW
“Every Stage of Becoming”
Through Aug. 5. Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. $5. Artist talk, 7 p.m. July 20. MOCA GA, 75 Bennett St. NW, Atlanta. 404-367-8700, mocaga.org.
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Deanna Sirlin is an artist and writer. She is known internationally for large-scale installations that have covered the sides of buildings from Atlanta to Venice, Italy. Her book, “She’s Got What It Takes: American Women Artists in Dialogue” (2013), is a critical yet intimate look at the lives and work of nine noted American women artists who have been personally important to Sirlin, based on conversations with each one.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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