WORK
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Cantwell’s own pieces, which are some of the most labor-intensive and poignant in the show, are environmentally conscious in subtle, startling ways. The Holy Spirit is a suspended sphere the size of an average globe that’s black and white with areas of gray. It’s wrapped with layers of cloth, and the beads that are stitched into it are almost camouflaged by pigeon feathers, a number of which also hang from the bottom like fringe; the feathers are “environmental garbage” that the artist collected on daily walks. She calls the work a meditation piece that was inspired by the image of the final dove Noah released from the ark–which never came back. One wonders if it prospered, as Noah surmised, or met with an accident that prevented its return. Then one shifts to thinking on a universal scale–will its fate be shared by the rest of the birds on our planet? The grayish feathers have an ashen, dead look. The work suddenly becomes a symbol of the species man is destroying. Yet there is a ray of hope in the spiritual cast of the piece. Jehovah did, after all, save Noah and the animals. Cantwell happened to tell me at the opening that the beads stood for the times she had said her prayers with a rosary, and the way she described the hours spent making the piece made them seem Zen-like. All of which gives the work a mix of Eastern and Western religiosity that contains something of the American Indian’s reverence for a sacred object.
Cantwell’s History Is an Angel could have been constructed by one of those contemporary-garbage archaeologists who sift through people’s trash cans to assess their habits. It’s made of a series of corrugated cardboard boxes covered with a collage of everything from grocery-store ads to unrecognizable paper scraps. The central focus is a black marble square with a poem adapted from a Laurie Anderson song etched into it. The work covers an extensive wall area from the floor almost to the ceiling, a size that makes one think of garbage taking over the world. Here, too, is a touch of Native American sensibility: taking ordinary objects and by working elaborate designs around them “honoring” them.
In Hammond’s Close and Far, a chiffon cloth is draped against the wall like a curtain, hanging loosely from a rusty “window” bar, whose lines parallel the horizontal lines of the built-in bookcase. But beyond this “curtain” is no view but that of a blank wall, a dead-end “landscape.” And because the work is next to the empty bookcase, it looks even starker. Hammond’s Carbon incorporates more chiffon, though this time it’s inside a real window frame. The material is doubled to give it more of an opaque sheen–it looks like parachute silk. Hieroglyphic marks are drawn on it with charcoal, and bits of charcoal and charred wood are sewn into pockets across its length and breadth. Silver thread and wire stitch glistening, snaking lines and bunched shapes. The overall impression is of a topographical map, but it’s a desolate vision–charred, scarred, and fragmented. It’s what we leave behind in our wastefulness and our greed for the new and novel, though again there is a tiny ray of hope: carbon is, after all, one of the elements necessary to life.
