As By Digging at Painted Bride, three artists delve into time, history, and the human psyche
By Chip Schwartz
December 27, 2017
Chip reviews the InLiquid show, "As By Digging," at Painted Bride, with three artists whose work digs for emotional truth in personal and other human histories.
At the Painted Bride Art Center’s gallery space, in an InLiquid show curated by Scott Schultheis,
Remembered shantytown architecture of Michelle Marcuse
Michelle Marcuse provides an unmistakably architectural foundation for her creative experiments as she affixes bits of cardboard together to form tiny huts and hovels splashed here and there with subtle streaks of white paint. While the corrugated forms inherent in the original cardboard material, paired with Marcuse’s construction techniques, allude to materials like vinyl siding or sheets of corrugated steel, almost everything used is a repurposed paper product with a wood pulp origin. It is no surprise, then, that these glued-together, reconstituted pulp sculptures mostly resemble treehouses or shanties also built primarily out of wood. Marcuse seems to draw parallels between consumer and industrial waste, much of which comes into and then swiftly leaves our lives, ushered between locations that are largely out of view of the average person.
The complicated tangles of fragments that Marcuse utilizes for her tiny structures indicate a pattern of organic, haphazard growth over time, sifted from some sort of convoluted, hidden past. However nothing about history or science is as cut and dry as it appears in its polished, publicized form. Indeed, building a historical narrative, or fitting together facts to see a bigger picture is often a messy and arduous journey with as many twists and turns as those built into this artist’s perplexing array of hallways, columns, and stairs.