Medium Rare

Unconventionality is the stock in trade for the artists exhibited in Medium Rare. Mariella Bisson, Gugger Petter, Kay Khan, and B. Shawn Cox flourish in the playground of unexpected media as they hopscotch genre boundaries and elevate everyday materials to the uses of fine art. These multidisciplinary artists look beyond what is to what could be—and in that process they take the viewer along with them.

GUGGER PETTER

Denmark-born global traveler Gugger Petter, a widely exhibited gallery and museum artist, employs paper in surprising ways. In the mid-1980s, seeking both limitation and challenge in a medium for her monumental portraiture, Petter found both in the usually fragile material of newspaper, which she converts into sturdier forms by rolling it tightly into tubes, weaving it, and sealing it with varnish. “Normally, a weaver would have to comply with what’s within the craft,” Petter says. “The edges have to be fine, and it has to be perfect. I’ve never done a weaving like that. I can’t work with anything too controlled. I had to create my own technique based on what might be pure mistake.”

Petter’s works embody a balance of tensions beyond the loom on which she weaves. The tapestries hover between opposites: control and chaos, light and dark, the everyday and the historical. Her portraits draw in the viewer: “When people see my work from far away, they

think it’s a painting,” she says. “It’s not until they are really up close that they see the material—then realism is gone and it’s pure abstraction.”

MARIELLA BISSON

Mariella Bisson celebrates nature’s forms and textures through multilayered collage. Her Vermont upbringing instilled in her an affinity for thick woodlands, cascading waterfalls, and tumbles of moss-covered rock. For decades, however, the Northwoods woman swam upstream in the urbanity of New York City. After earning a BFA from Pratt Institute, she worked as a curator, arts advocate, and educator in Brooklyn while building her full-time studio practice. Since then, her work has earned the attention and support of prominent foundations and artist-inresident programs across the U.S.

After September 11, 2001, Bisson answered the mountains’ call and relocated her studio practice to the Catskills. In this haven she captures landscapes in sculptural relief, beginning with custom-stretched linen canvases or wood panels, on which she works in layered paper, archival sealant, and oil paint. In the final creations, light cast from above catches minuscule edges of paper, creating the dappled shadows flickering in a forest, and subtle textures emerging from under the paint mimic such natural objects as foliage or bark. The result is not purely representational, but it is evocative.

“There’s always a need for nature. It’s what we’re made of,” Bisson says. “I hope people looking at one of my paintings feel that sweet spot between person, painting, and planet.”

KAY KHAN

Santa Fe–based Kay Khan’s fiber sculptures slowly reveal their intricacy to the viewer. Hailing from a family of makers, Khan trained as a painter and ceramist. It was while reassembling a motorcycle seat while working a post-graduate job as an upholsterer that she began to realize new possibilities for textile art.

Inspired by amphorae, ancient Greek jars or vases that served as both sculptures and storytelling objects, Khan’s early textile sculptures began with vessels often rendered on a grand scale. She uses cottons, silks, satins, and felts, as well as a full repertoire of sewing techniques: quilting, stitching, embroidering, appliqué. She rarely uses wire armatures—the fabric stands on its own.

Today, Khan is continuing her Armor and Façade series, which reconstructs and reimagines aspects of garments as figurative sculpture. It is, “at the most basic level, about how we protect (armor) and present

Opposite top to bottom: Mariella Bisson, First Falls, Spruce Creek Trail, mixed media on linen, 50” × 38”. Mariella Bisson, Split Birch, Bluestone, Red Trail Series, mixed media on linen, 38” × 50”. Left: Kay Khan, Finestra, stitched cotton, silk, felt, wire, 26.5” × 16” × 8”. Above: Kay Khan, The Lion, the Cardinal, and the Rose, stitched, quilted, embroidered mixed media, 16” × 16”.

(armor and façade) ourselves through what we wear,” Khan says. “A friend once said to me, in an offhand remark when giving me advice, ‘Guard your heart.’ That intriguing phrase inspired the armor.” Ceremonial masks comprise a subset of the series. They are “perhaps the ultimate armor, because they both represent and highlight, as well as hide a true identity,” Khan says.

Khan’s works are now among the collections of the Albuquerque Museum, a long-held dream of the artist’s, who set herself that goal when she arrived in New Mexico more than 25 years ago. They are also held by the New Mexico Museum of Art and many other institutions. Often, the pieces compete against more conventional sculpture for these coveted spots.

B. SHAWN COX

B. Shawn Cox refashions conventional narratives with his choices of materials, deconstructing and rebuilding story through a handful of mediums: acrylic on fabric, reassembled modulated paper, and lenticular printing (i.e., printed images that produce an illusion of depth that appears to shift or move when viewed from different angles).

Cox’s recent work stars cowboys, those visual icons of the West. His West Texas youth of dusty days spent turning out cattle stood in stark contrast to the polished glamor of the cowboys he’d watch on TV in the evenings. He saw little of the stereotypical masculinity of these Hollywood figures in his own home, where his dad may have been the ostrichboot–clad figurehead but his mother managed ranch operations. Today, through this lens of personal memory and his urban experience as a practicing lawyer in Austin, Texas, he graphically challenges the iconographic figure.

Cox sometimes literally flips the image of the cowboy on its head. In his lenticular prints he simulcasts male and female images, leading the viewer to question where one begins and the other ends. In his fabric works, floral patterns back the printed steely gaze of a cowboy and vintage cowgirl pin-ups as he subverts contemporary social mythology.

Cox’s architectural training informs his sculptural paper works. His discrete materials, which have included pages from a Bible, children’s books, and copies of Playboy magazine, slough their original meanings as he disconnects them from their sources. Then, with origami paper building blocks, Cox creates new meanings through juxtaposition.

Cox—and each of the artists in Medium Rare—enlists materiality to create the unexpected and unusual. Each calls on the viewer to consider that things aren’t always what they seem.

—Ashley M. Biggers

Above: Kay Khan, Flicker, stitched and quilted silk, cotton, felt, 25” × 32” × 9”. Opposite: B. Shawn Cox, clockwise from top left: Curlee Q Stach, Lavender Dreams, Yella Fella, Midnight Sky; oil on fabric, 48” × 36” each.