Marta Kaemmer’s exhibition Pull It Together, at Musa Collective, paradoxically proposes synthesis through her innate ability to pull things apart. Her parts-to-whole process examines relationship and contingency, variability, invention, and transformation. Her intention is always to open a space for possibility.
Kaemmer’s materials and techniques are many, as are her art historical strategies. Domestic craft, textiles, knitting, pattern, and decoration—the familial, soft, flexible, and variable—conspire with the fundamentals of painting and the language of abstraction: targets, stripes, stains, props, the geometric and gestural, vertical and assertive. Restless experimenting yields components such as knitted birds, paper bowls, patterned plinths, paint skins, and altered textiles, which she assembles through impulse and patient observation, coaxing new meaning into form and focus.
Kaemmer’s work considers the arbitrary with regard to boundaries, borders, rules, and acceptability. Who says? Who decides? And why is it so? Nomadic by nature, Kaemmer was born in Rhodesia to missionary parents, raised in the Midwest, and settled for a time in Austria. She recalls being able to stand with one foot in Slovenia and the other in Austria. Bramble bushes, trees, and an occasional white pole with the Austrian red and white stripe at the top were all that demarcated the borderline. Contiguous to her property, at a time when Slovenia was still part of Yugoslavia, existed a hundred-meter green strip of “no man's land” patrolled by Serbian military lads. Her ex-husband’s pigs would occasionally escape from the barn and run free in this green zone. If lucky, some of the young soldiers, most farm boys themselves, would help them round up the wayward pigs. The pigs were as indifferent of national boundaries as Kaemmer is mindful of contingencies, connectedness, and inevitable change—and that life isn’t always what it seems. Soldiers are also farm lads, and Slovenia is Yugoslavia, then Slovenia. Human experience is vast and varied, yet fragile threads of commonality can fortify it, striking a balance both precarious and hard-won. Kaemmer’s work, informed by her fluid life experiences, presents this multiplicity and unlikely accord.
Her assemblages convert answers and assumptions to questions, blurring expectation through incessant visual inquiry and a play of particulars and uncertainties. Everything both is and isn’t, and is not likely what it appears to be. A tie-dyed tablecloth is elevated to royalty in her piece Queen, complete with a knitted crown. Victoria Falls imitates gestural “painting,” but is, in fact, an assembled collage of artist-made paint skins affixed to a thrift store gingham bed sheet.
Generator, an immersive mixed media installation that is human in scale and democratically diverse in scope, is an optical opus. Here Kaemmer hones her own process of dreaming the piece into being from a constellation of stuff. Her “more is more” aesthetic demonstrates intelligence inherent in incident and that chaos can be transformative, even transcendent. Knitted spires provide structure, effusively inhabited by bowls, birds, and feather-bedecked canvases. Shadows are cast, colors glow, touch is paramount, and every aspect contributes to the whole. Kaemmer’s seemingly effortless effort stimulates our own awareness and experience of active looking. Consciousness courts the unconscious, and like a butterfly alights briefly, connects broadly, and feasts on flux.
Gateway is a mixed media assemblage of two wooden structural forms: one rectangular and propped, the other circular and hung, both draped with a knitted shroud. At 85 inches tall it has a commanding presence, and its deep slate-colored hues are light sucking. But it is the subtleties that pull one in and hint at a deeper dimensional perspective. Shadows cast upon the wall in expected gradations comingle with a fluorescent orange radiance reflected from the underside of the piece. The open knit fabric conforms to the hovering circular shape and extends itself as a veil to the attending rectangle below, its sooty color revealing jewel tones at close viewing. A loose length of yarn further gestures towards the cross brace or midpoint of the piece. Grayness gives way to color as geometric structure yields to soft organic seduction. Minimal in form yet perceptually complex, Gateway posits the potential of unexpected cohesion and connection.
Pull It Together is a thought-provoking and visually satisfying exhibition. The takeaway may be the title itself and a constructive narrative gleaned from the sum total array of Marta Kaemmer’s fiber-based work. Pull It Together is an instruction, a question, and a hope, which seems to focus attention on the ambiguous “it” of the exhibition’s title. However we may define “it,” Kaemmer’s investigations encourage us to keep it open, keep it loose, and keep it together—together.
Pull It Together was on view at Musa Collective January 13 – January 27, 2018. More of Marta Kaemmer's work can be found at http://mkaemmer.com/.
Musa Collective is a collective gallery whose mission it is to create a dialogue between artists and the Boston arts community. Located at 119 Braintree Street, Boston, MA, the gallery is open by appointment. www.musacollectiveboston.com
