catalog essay for CERCANDO NULLA/LOOKING FOR NOTHING
Luminal Longing
Melinda Smith Altshuler makes objects that explore this relationship of home and nature, inside and outside, lightness and darkness. At first glance her work has the geometric simplicity of formal abstraction --black geometric skeletal forms used as framing devices for translucent membranes that capture and contain light. And while there is a passing reference to minimalism, especially to those artists working during the 60's in the west-coast light movement in Altshuler's native Los Angeles, the artist breaks from this tradition in her insistence on the referential mark. For upon closer inspection, the luminous surfaces that characterize her work, are not transparent but are riddled with the trails of the artist's process. Tiny drips, air pockets, the outline of a paintbrush as it makes its trace, all create a unique calligraphy with each layer -- like ice forming at the surface of a freezing lake -- expressing the pock marks of its sedimentation. These intimate shadows would lay hidden, though, were it not for the use of light, a force of nature that the artist (re)claims as a material. It is a striking light, white and pure, cool in its effect, not the warm glow of fireplace or reading light that you would expect in the home. And it is because of its insistent starkness, that the black frames that would attempt to contain it, begin to demand attention.
For even though most of these objects would seem to disappear into their flat black surfaces, their forms are so familiar, so heimlich, that we need only the barest of visual cues to recognize the skeletal remains of a picnic basket, the frame that once held a needlepoint project, the wishbone rescued from a turkey dinner. Likewise, the uniformity of color does not act to neutralize their domestic form but allows for quirky details to emerge -- a gouge in the turkey bone resulting from the wrenching motion of severing the bone without giving up its wish, achip in the molding of a picture frame, a piece of wicker that is forever buckled as an imprinted reminder of a hand that once carried it. These are all inconsequential details in the language of function but are the charged signposts in the realm of the familiar, in the realm of memory.
In Altshuler's work, the cool light of nature and the humble aesthetics of the home exist in what Bachelard terms a dialectical relationship. The boundaries between the two are never fixed. While nature's light tends toward the vast, captured in expanses of clouds and on surfaces of water, it can suddenly become small and insignificant - a patch of light streaming in on a kitchen table or caught in the reflection of glass on a frame. Likewise the space of the home can lose its intimacy, by pulling our memories into a vast void. Customs of how we wish for things, how we display our family in an arrangement of pictures on the wall, how we create needlework for the home, are traditions that come from a place with no beginning, transmitted through generations yet never fully understood. But Altshuler does not merely invert the normal order of things by making nature concrete in her luminous surfaces and the domestic vast in her black frames of homey punctum. In her work, this inversion is always tenuous. First the light, and then the frames, fight for our attention. Sometimes the transparent membranes evoke the power of nature, and other times they seem as nothing more than broken glass. If, as Bachelard believes, the poetic image exists on the threshold of inside and outside then it is always on the way to becoming, always longing for that part it does not have. In her object-making Altshuler is aware of this narrow space of desire and her poetic images capture the ambiguity of our longing. They exist as a reminder that we build windows in both our homes and our psyches, inviting the vastness of the outside in. But this unpredictable force is not always a gracious guest. Its pure light dazzles us but at the same time exposes the hesitant streak marks of our invitation.
Lise Patt
28, May 1999
Lise Patt is the founder and director of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry.
