PIXERINA WITCHERINA
curated by Julie Heffernan
June 28 - August 4, 2024
Kleinert/James Center for the Arts
36 Tinker Street · Woodstock, NY · 12498
Magisterium
Pixerina Witcherina Magisterium
By Julie Heffernan, exhibition curator
Pixerina Witcherina Magisterium brings together the work of Joan Bankemper, Ruth Marten and Jenny Lynn McNutt in a visual conversation about slant authority, languages of the absurd and the abundant pleasures of too muchness.
Pixerina Witcherina is the name Virginia Woolf gave to the secret, wickywacky dialect she invented and used to share secrets with her young niece Angelica. According to historical accounts, it sounded to others like “a flow of absolutely absurd conversation… [spoken] in a high-pitched voice using a crazy language made up of unrecognizable sounds.” How many of us as children, I ask myself now, had our own kinds of play-talk too, before self-consciousness (before ridicule from non-Woolfians, those who abjure the irrational) changed our playing fields?
We trust Woolf’s writing implicitly for the role it plays in reminding us of our own interiority, subjectivity itself becomes available to us through her words. We believe her “crazy language” because it speaks to the truth of the writing process as one of deciphering, untangling interior mishmash, rendering subjectivity with power and particularity. Because it feels more “real” than the reality around us. She infuses all that singular language—whether it be the gibberish of Pixerina Witcherina or the poetry of Mrs. Dalloway— with the authority of the exquisite, from the Latin to seek out: painstakingly, or ecstatically, finding a voice for the kind of subjective musings we barely notice as we go about, say, buying flowers for a party. The artists in this show share that kind of language, writ large and speaking through their materials. That kind of language has its own authority, a kind of Magisterium, for those participating in the game, tantamount to the official and authoritative teachings of a Church. In fact, it was in Church that my sister and I made up our own kind of language with our hands, where we’d push and prod each other’s fingers into various positions that mimicked the language of our sisterhood, until one of us squeaked. But even if we can’t conjure such intricate play gestures anymore, we both remember, half a century later, how absolutely engrossing that kind of interior experience really was.
One of the joys of art making is how the act of working can get us closer to that rarified state of inner play. I had a teacher who would always object when we’d say we were “playing” with an idea in our work, as though to play were just too frivolous. It seems to me now that artists do play/work all the time, getting as close as they can to the innocent, engrossing absorption of
kids. Having watched my own children playing, I can absolutely attest to the deep seriousness of their games: rigorous methodologies for figuring out how the world works, “play” as an audition for adulthood, “play” as the building of worlds. Such creative engagement makes hours sweep by like a swim in a pond in the rain. That engrossment is what characterizes the works of Joan Bankemper, Ruth Marten and Jenny Lynn McNutt.
Each of these artists engages particular modes of making that infuse gorgeous craft with the absurd, shifting familiar imagery into the Woolfian with a flick of a wrist and wink of an eye. Each subscribes to an ethos of generosity, with rich imagery that accretes and multiplies into complex forms, hosting ideas that give us fresh perspectives on the hybrid nature of the so-called real world.
Joan Bankemper draws on gardens, the richer and wilder the better—flowers and teacups re- forming into Brobdignagian urns; broken plates and bees creating monstrances as radiant in their outrageousness as the ones spun from pure gold inside Catholic churches. Her art comes out of a social practice from the 1990s involving non-traditional gardens and medicinal plants. Begun in response to the AIDS crisis, these projects later became ends in themselves when Bankemper founded Black Meadow Barn, a 150-year-old working farm in the Hudson Valley where “horticulture and culture meet.” Cultivating art and gardens together, Bankemper brings the beauty and wildness of nature into her multimedia ceramic forms.
Using hundreds of molds from found ceramic objects, both antique and modern, Bankemper assembles the parts into what have been described as “miniature architectural follies.” Inspired by Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, where architecture and ceramics fuse, Bankemper transforms modest tableware into explosions of form made from the hundreds of ceramics she has collected over time. Her references vary widely—from Hindu and Buddhist mandalas to Victorian china painting with a sprinkling of Bosch, allowing her to discover and invent with abandon while maintaining a firm grounding in the wonderland of nature herself.
Ruth Marten brings a collage sensibility and sublime drawing expertise to refashion old prints into newfangled figures that sprout alligators and multiple feet. Starting with 18th century engravings once sequestered away in old libraries and illustrating everything from costumes and status objects to natural history and superstitions, these prints on hand-made paper are transformed by Marten into absurdist reflections on the nature
of sexuality, identity and the slipperiness of imagination. Formerly a book and fashion illustrator as well as a tattooist in her early years, Marten brings a consummate artistry to her drawings, with such polished rendering skills that whatever transformations she makes to the original print are effectively invisible to the viewer. One gets the sense that the original print is finally actually finished with Marten’s maneuvers. An ease and suppleness
Ruth Marten brings a collage sensibility and sublime drawing expertise to refashion old prints into newfangled figures that sprout alligators and multiple feet. Starting with 18th century engravings once sequestered away in old libraries and illustrating everything from costumes and status objects to natural history and superstitions, these prints on hand-made paper are transformed by Marten into absurdist reflections on the nature of sexuality, identity and the slipperiness of imagination. Formerly a book and fashion illustrator as well as a tattooist in her early years, Marten brings a consummate artistry to her drawings, with such polished rendering skills that whatever transformations she makes to the original print are effectively invisible to the viewer. One gets the sense that the original print is finally actually finished with Marten’s maneuvers. An ease and suppleness characterize her linework, lifting the original print to another plane of beauty, according to the delight one feels in the company of an absurdist’s wit or a trompe l’oeil surprise.
Of this new body of work Marten states: “I was electrified by the exuberant poses of these young women, probably dancers. In those years following the Great War, women gained the vote, cut off their hair and removed their corsets, becoming Modern Women. As a teenager in the 1960s, I always identified with that spirit. Add a surreal bent, a love of C.G. Jung, and a mordant sense of humor to all that and you get this new body of work.”
Jenny Lynn McNutt draws on the fertile world of animals—hares, frogs, bees—to make her art. The morphologies of their forms and the rituals of their intricate behaviors shape her vision. She explores animal lore, through the lens of her own intimate take on biophilia. Hybrids with fluid boundaries, her creatures allude to an ancient kinship between all animals, their so-called differences becoming unimportant as we realize that only a few genetic pairings distinguish them. These are primordial beings, ones not so different perhaps from those that rose out of the first primeval goo. They are vaguely, squirmingly familiar to us in the reptilian centers of our brains. Wonder compels McNutt in the studio. She says, “It is the elastic continuum of all biological life that fascinates me. But the eternal oceanic seabed of life also inspires both terror and awe. My sculptures, which have been described as ‘a nativity of squirms,’ express the force, distress and urgency of biological life today.”
In this current body of work, McNutt was inspired by Assyrian, Chinese and African art, along with historical and contemporary mythologies from numerous cultures: “Sumerian to Dr. Seuss, El Greco to Malian sculpture, the Chinese hare in the moon to Bugs Bunny.”
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Joan Bankemper was born in Covington, Kentucky in 1959. She received a B.F.A. from Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri and an M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Mount Royal Graduate School, Baltimore.
HISTORY WITH GARDENS
The artist’s ceramic mosaic vessels grow out of 15 years of commitment to creating urban gardens with the help of surrounding communities. She has worked on projects in New York, Boston, Palermo, Italy and San Antonio, Texas, among others addressing the relationship of people to nature as reflected in the contemporary urban landscape. Her garden projects are not ordinary or formal gardens; they range from restorative healing herb gardens, to gardens based on the shape of the human body, to planting 600 giant sunflowers, which grow from the ruins of a Southern flour mill. For each of her garden projects, the artist worked within a conceptual framework, each a kind of sculpture in nature.
TECHNIQUE
Bankemper’s ceramic mosaics follow her love of nature and its transformations as the seasons change. She loves flowers, birds, bees, all the symbols of the garden and the creatures that help pollinate and cross-pollinate the flowers. Thus, the birds, bees and flowers are staccato notes on virtually all of her vessels. Working in the way a collagist or assemblagist might, Bankemper creates monumental scale vessels, beginning with a simple glass vase at the core. She surrounds the glass vase with the shape of an urn, be it tall and graceful with elegant handles, or round and flat with a “canvas-like” field to cover. The ceramic urn that surrounds the glass is the molds, the artist creates myriad shapes and sizes, animals and figurines; a yellow bird sits on the handle of a blue fish pitcher while a hand-built bluebird and a bevy of bees buzz around “In pod,” a buttery yellow urn topped off with black decals of bees and words for the consummate cookie jar: cookies, pasta, sugar, coffee, tea, cookies again. Several birds bedeck the top of the urn, and many species of flowers create a garden at its bottom, all perched on an antique tureen base that becomes the foot of the vessel. Combining historical ceramics, contemporary china, hand-built objects, casting from molds that were made between 1958-1998, Bankemper creates an original tableau in
ceramic. Everywhere the eye looks, there is something rich, textured and layered for the eye to behold. These are not simple pieces; they are complex tapestries of life.
The artist’s work has been shown in many venues, most notably Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California and the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan. Her work has also been exhibited in many garden venues such as Wave Hill, Bronx, New York; Abington Art Center, Jenkinton, Pennsylvania as well as extensively in Italy.
Since late 2006, Ruth Marten has been drawing on historic prints from the Western canon. Starting with 18th Century engravings designed to illustrate social beliefs, natural history, costumery, objects of status, the sciences and superstitions, these prints on hand-made paper originally lived in leatherbound volumes on the shelves of libraries of the gentry. Eager to explore how much or how little culture has progressed in four centuries, these collaborative works have proven to be a good foil and a great work out for her own absurdist perspective.
Eight exhibits and four books were generated from this obsession and the book titles themselves broadcast the state of mind: Historie un-Naturelle 2008, The Unvarnished Truth (2013), Fountains and Alligators (2016), and, with the catalogue that accompanied her retrospective at the Max Ernst Museum, Dream Lover (2018). Source material is everywhere but especially in Flea Markets, along the Seine at the Bouquinistes and at Argosy Print Shop, New York’s best and oldest antiquarian book store where once Marten had an afterschool job 1967.
Having been a book and fashion illustrator as well as a tattooist in her early years, she’s at home with drawing, line and paper, making this new body of work, All about Eve a stylistic departure. The portfolio of female nudes, NUS, was created by a Polish photographer, self- titled Yarlew, in 1923 using a 19th Century photo mechanical technique, photogravure, where a photograph is exposed and engraved onto a copper plate as one would an etching. Differently, the image is soft focus making gouache the ideal medium and expressive painting the method.
Marten’s new work was exhibited at the National Arts Club, NYC, the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, Woodstock, NY and at van der Grinten Galerie, Cologne, Germany (catalogue).
Jenny Lynn McNutt is a visual artist whose practice encompasses painting, drawing and ceramic sculpture. Originally from Tennessee, McNutt has spent the past 30 years living and working in Brooklyn, NY, and recently set up a studio in an old church in upstate NY as well. McNutt earned an MFA from Yale School of Art and was a Fulbright fellow to West and Central Africa. For her documentary work in West Africa she received an Eastman Foundation grant. McNutt has shown her work both nationally and internationally, including North Africa and China. In 2019 her ceramic sculptures were included in the American Academy of Arts & Letters Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts. Other recent exhibitions in NYC include: Ceramics + Drawing into Sculpture, Anthro-Shift, and Cosmophilia. Her work will be featured in an upcoming group show entitled Biophilia at Pamela Salisbury in Hudson, NY, and in 2025, a solo exhibition of her work will be presented at the New York Studio School, where she currently teaches.
Acknowledgments:
Thanks to William Conger of Illinois State University for inspiring me to revisit the idea of his show “Pixerina Witcherina” at the University Galleries in 2002 with my own version of it here at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts.
JOAN BANKEMPER
Violet 2019 ceramic
28” x 22” x 13” inches
Joan Bankemper
38” x 21” x 12” inches
Joan Bankemper
26” x 21” x 9” inches
Joan Bankemper
Garrison 2019 ceramic
Joan Bankemper
Connections #3 2023
Gouache on paper 17” x 14” inches
Joan Bankemper
Connections #6 2023
Gouache on paper 17” x 14” inches
Gouache on photogravure
10” x 7.5” inches
Ruth Marten #28
RUTH MARTEN
Gouache on photogravure
10” x 7.5” inches
Ruth Marten #45
Gouache on photogravure
10” x 7.5” inches
Ruth Marten #52
Gouache on photogravure
10” x 7.5” inches
Ruth Marten #46
Gouache on photogravure
10” x 7.5” inches
Ruth Marten #23
Gouache on photogravure 10” x 7.5” inches
Ruth Marten #42
Jenny Lynn McNutt Chimera 4 2024
fired ceramic 14" x 14" x 15"
JENNY LYNN McNUTT
Jenny Lynn McNutt Oracle in Bronze 2018-19
porcelain with antique bronze glazes in reduction firing 30" h x 24" w x 24" d
Jenny Lynn McNutt
Chimera (White with Base) 2022-23
ceramic with glaze on glazed base
17” x 16” x 12” inches
Jenny Lynn McNutt
Polka Dot Oracle with Flowers ceramic with glaze
17” x 16” x 12” inches
Jenny Lynn McNutt
Polka Dot Oracle 2023
fired ceramic 14"h x 10"w x 10"l
ceramic with various glazes, 18" x 32" x L 27"
Jenny Lynn McNutt
Inanna 2017
Gratitude for this exhibition goes to the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild Board of Directors, Executive Director, Ursula Morgan, Exhibitions Director, Jen Dragon, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild Exhibitions Committee the exhibition artists: Joan Bankemper, Ruth Marten and Jenny Lynn McNutt and exhibition curator, Julie Heffernan.
Original graphic design concept and cover design: Susanna Ronner Design Studio
Installation Photography: John Kleinhans
Catalogue Design: Jen Dragon
Catalogue Cover Design: Susanna Ronner
