Wendy Franklund Miller: Looking for the Line

Looking for the Line

WENDY FRANKLUND MILLER September 7 - November 3, 2001

JUNDT ART MUSEUM G 0 n zag a U n i v e r sit Y • S P 0 k a n e, Was h i n 9 ton

Looking for the Line: A Way of Ordering AN EXISTENTIAL PROCESS In Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Unconso/ed, a musician named Ryder comes to a nameless town in order to conduct a concert. It is a slightly fantastic, wholly philosophical novel. Over 500 pages are devoted to how every possible thing in life steps in and intrudes upon what Ryder believes is his goal of conducting the above-mentioned concert. At the time Ishiguro wrote it, reviewers rightfully compared it to Kafka's existential work, The Castle. It is a story worth repeating because it so aptly describes the human condition. In this small exhibition of work, Looking for the Line, Wendy Franklund Miller tells a similar story. She makes paintings that wend and weave their way through images and iconography.

She layers colors within sheets of wax, and we look, anxiously at first, trying to arrive at one, single solitary point-only to discover that the richness of her work is not nearly so linear, so goal oriented. The pleasure of viewing these paintings lies precisely in how myriad scraps of visual data rest together, irrationally arranged. Their crowded presence, their very proximity to one another, creates a dialogue that in and of itself talks of something much more subtle than any single idea.

LAYERS of WAX, LAYERS of THOUGHT The paintings here are all encaustic, an ancient and remarkably durable medium (there are existing encaustics that are as old as the 2nd century B.C.). It is also a demanding medium that requires great skill and delicacy.

Contemporary encaustics are generally made by covering drawn marks with sheets of wax, which are then heated or burned by a propane torch to create a series of smooth layers as translucent as amber. The archeology of the painting is laid bare for the viewer. In these works one sees lines of every quality-thin and tentative, crystalline clear and bold, hand drawn, and stenciled-all suspended throughout layers and layers of waxy rich color. Some parts are obscured in the process; they leave odd ghosts of original imagery and make new, unlikely associations between what can still be seen. Franklund Miller uses beeswax, and it lends all her work a faintly musky smell, redolent of outdoors and mild decay. In contrast to all this visual and olfactory sensuality however, she fills most of her paintings with an astonishing amount of specific visual information. In Man on the Moon, an outline of a man in a bowler hat floats horizontally above another mirror image of himself, which is nestled on top of a large orange orb. The orb looks a bit like an over ripe and oversized rose hip. Throughout the entire Beliefseries, one sees flowers, bits of human anatomy, teeth, remnants of lace, and scientific models crowded up or layered on one another. In Belief #6, the numerals one through nine (with the noticeable exception of five) are carefully stenciled in a neat sequence, but they appear out of nowhere. It is a free fall.

With such a disparate collection of symbols, Franklund Miller creates a visual vocabulary that mirrors human thought. Her Beliefseries, like Ishiguro's novel, is rewarding to anyone with the least penchant for introspection or human psychology. There is a gentle humor in viewing such a plethora of icons and associations. Its chaos is resolutely human; it is something we all know.

Franklund Miller's work as a papermaker and painter has garnered her numerous awards, including a Washington State Artists Trust grant. The list of public and private collections that house her work is extensive, and she has exhibited in cities throughout the United States and in Nishinomiya, Japan. She is currently represented by the Lorinda Knight Gallery in Spokane, and the Augen Gallery in Portland plans an exhibition

of her work in 2002. Her list of heroes: Agnes Martin, Sol Lewitt, Sean Scully, Squeak Carnwath-excepting the latter-are noted for-the extreme minimalism of their imagery, their sparsely ordered surfaces and objects.

Opposites attract. Rather than giving the viewer a discrete, quiet surface, Franklund Miller sets up a visual challenge that forces the viewer to make his or her own sense of the multiple references.

MATERIALS, TECHNIQUE, and PROCESS In addition to her formal education, she has studied at Banff and recently was an artist-in-residence at the Women's Studio Workshop in New York. But among her peers, Franklund Miller is noted for her ability to teach herself new media. Adept at absorbing traditional techniques, she uses them in unlikely ways. In 1984 she began working with handmade paper. By 1988 she had turned simple papermaking into larger than life-sized sculptures. Within five years her reputation had grown to the point that she was giving papermaking workshops to others throughout the area and as far away as Alaska. When Franklund Miller was invited to demonstrate her technique to Bellevue Art Fair-goers in 1988, Karen Mathieson of the Seattle Times remarked on her strong and unusual approach to the craft of papermakinq.' In the early 1990's, through contact with multi-media artist Carl Chew from Seattle, she took on an entirely new medium. She taught herself computer aided design programs. Within a year she was designing her own rugs, which were then woven in Nepal. Most of these works are now housed in private collections.

Her learning curve with encaustic painting was similarly steep and quick. After a 1994 artist residency, she began to include language and text in her works and to use wax. By the mid-1990's, with the Mute series (a reference to Alzheimer's Disease), she was layering paper with natural materials, such as stones, submerged under sheets of wax. She credits her fascination with media and technique to her personality, claiming that "encaustic and papermaking take a lot of time. You have to have an ability to focus on small things and let that be."

One is tempted to highlight the materials involved in Franklund Miller's work, because of her virtuoso technique.

But this would do an injustice to the work itself. What makes her work so seductive is that the technique appears effortless; it advances itself easily to the many social and intellectual ideas behind each piece.

Robert Kochs of Augen Gallery feels that Franklund Miller's work suggests views that are at once both "macrocosmic and microcosmic." He says, "with some of her paintings, I feel I could be either looking through a microscope or a telescope."

MYRIAD SCRAPS to MAKE a WHOLE This ability to render minute details and ideas as well as large abstract concepts is due partly to Franklund Miller's working style. Intellectually she has, at various times, been inspired by issues as broad as war, religion, traditional roles of women, and aging. Yet her glossary of images is culled from the smallest, most mundane sources. In addition to drawing by hand, she traces the outlines of bric-a-brac-flowers, a piece of furniture, even a car ornament are forms that she repeats over and over again. They become a cultural shorthand. The rose (in particular plastic roses molded in relief) is found in her work with a fair amount of frequency. Many of the more abstract images that run across the surface of her work come from equally unexpected sources. The concentric circles that appear throughout these series were made by tracing the lines of a small cooking grill onto the wax layers. In Belief #7 there is an image of waves on the viewer's left; the pattern came from a text on DNA. The next work, Belief #8, has another wave that echoes this scientific illustration, but was actually made by pressing a potato masher into the soft surface of the painting.

Graters and meat tenderizers are also used to create textures and patterns. There is a slightly feminist, decidedly deadpan humor in the way Franklund Miller wields kitchenware as tools for her abstract ideas.

Using such household objects or cheap decorative kitsch amuses her. She claims, "Often people don't see it, but I think it's funny. "It amuses me to make 'high' art from so-called 'low' art."

Not only does Franklund Miller use standard domestic objects as drawing tools, she appropriates equally standardized icons from medical, nautical, and botanical textbooks to make up her satisfyingly associative narratives. One can identify teeth, drawings of knots, bowls, and funnels in nearly all her work. In Bride, the dominant image is a tracing of an ornate table leg that floats over an earlier layer of both a knot and a rose.

Netting from a veil is also incised into the surface, and the result lets the viewers into all the anxiety associated with weddings and commitment. Cuspids, those odd pointed teeth that mirror the human frame, appear and reappear in different alignments. In Belief #8 they face one another like two autonomous beings, and in Open they are arranged horizontally with their very points intersecting.

In Fall 2000 she received a commission from Temple Beth Shalom to create an encaustic for their Ark Doors. Attracted to the symbolism of religions, she saw this commission as an opportunity to make time to study traditional Judaic imagery. "I am attracted to the visual iconography of religions. Ideally, I'd like to take a couple of months every year to delve into another religion." She added that now the encaustic is installed, she loves going into the synagogue to polish the piece. "It's wonderful to pop into a spiritual place that is the core of beliefs." That the Beliefseries was completed during this same time is an appropriate addendum to the specificity of the Synagogue's commission. The series is a secular work that jumps from DNA patterns to the muscular structure of the eyeball. It is a poetic interpretation of the underlying human psychology that fosters belief and faith.

In the series Line/Incline, Franklund Miller seems to be playing with the process of drawing itself. Each of these 12 by 12 inch boxes is constructed as a frame that opens to reveal a smaller interior square. In Line/Incline, each small interior square hosts a central image of either concentric circles or an ellipse or dots. Perhaps because the imagery in this series is sparser and the layering of paint is more opaque, the tension between the viscous quality of the wax and Franklund Miller's confident use of line is heightened. If the Belief series mirrors our thinking processes, these little boxes suggest something much more personal.

They are an anatomy of Franklund Miller's own working process-a distillation of her colors, ideas, and line.

It is probably safe to say that we look at the arts through filters that are both cultural and personal. But there is a flux within those filters that gives the visual arts its breadth. There is a power in the way visual symbols

can .skirt both the Ifteralness of words and tlie abStraction of sCi,und. When asked to write on Franklund Miller's work, I found myself dwelling on psychology and how her restive arrangement of information resonates with our complex world. Franklund Miller describes her paintings more. mOdestly: "I see these works ;:is? a way of gathering my symbols. What I am doing is taking all the symbOls from my past and trying to use. them ina way that makes sense of contemporary life. We are exposed to so much information every day. On one hand, we can't possibly absorb all of it, so we have to choose=we have to try and make our own sense of it all." She continues, "My core interests deal with equality and access to information. These are the really important issues. I took the idea of 'belief' as a way of naming that process. There is always this longing, a way to make everything make sense, but we never reach it. We'd better Just accept it and laugh-just admit we don't know and let our sense of humor take over."

Frances DeVuono

l~Bell~vue fair focuses ... ", Karen Mathieson. Seattle Times, July 29,1988.

Wendy Franklund Miller was born in 1943 in Bismarck, North Dakota, and grew up in Yakima, Washington. She received her B.S. in 1976 from Eastern Washington University and studied art at Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada; Gonzaga University; Oregon State University; Spokane Falls Community College, and Walla Walla Community College. She now lives and works in Spokane.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Selected Public Collections

Solus, Lorinda Knight Gallery, Spokane, 1998 Encaustics, North Idaho College, 1997 Mute, Lorinda Knight Gallery, Spokane, 1997 Noctuary, Chase Gallery, Spokane, 1992 Friendly Fire, Skagit Valley College, 1992 Recent Work, Bellevue Community College, 1991 Departure, Eastern Washington University, 1990 Witness, Whitworth College, Spokane, 1988 Influences: Paying Homage, University of Montana, Missoula, 1988 Influences: Paying Homage, Seattle Pacific University, 1987

Amoco Corp., Chicago Cheney Cowles Museum, Spokane Eastern Washington University Foundation General Motors, Chicago IBM Corporation, Spokane Illinois Bell Telephone Co., Chicago North by Northwest, Boise, Spokane Safeco Insurance Co., Spokane Spokane City Hall Temple Beth Shalom, Spokane Washington State Arts Commission Westinghouse Corporation, Chicago Xerox Corporation, Chicago

Selected Two-Person Exhibitions

Selected Awards

Lorinda Ventura Seattle Sinclair

Artist Trust 10th Anniversary President's Award, 1997 Fellowship, Women's Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY, 1994 Big Sky Biennial VI, Idaho State University, 1990

Knight Gallery, February 2000 College, Ventura, CA, 1996 Pacific University, .1996 College, Dayton, Ohio, 1994

Selected Group Exhibitions

Selected Bibliography

Lorinda Knight Gallery, August 2000 On Target, Lorinda Knight Gallery, Spokane, 1998 Computer Art Exhibition, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, 1998 Way Out West: Art From the Other Washington, Washington, DC, 1998 Distinct Vernacular, Washington State Convention Center, Seattle, 1997 Interior Idioms, Seafirst Gallery, Seattle, 1995 National Paper Invitational, Central Washington University, 1991 100 Years of Washington Art, Tacoma Art Museum, 1989

Brunsman & Askey. Modernism & Beyond: Women Artists of the Pacific Northwest (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1993), pp. 162-163.

Cohn, Terri. "About Paper." Artweek, August 23, 1986.

Crane, Julianne. "Wendy Franklund Miller." The Local Planet, April 13, 2000.

Drake, Tommi. Celebrate Northwest Women.

Catalog, Rogue Community College, 1994.

Grove, Connie. "Art for All:' The Inlander, January 15, 1997.

Mathieson, Kathy. "Papermaking Focus."

Seattie Times, July 29, 1988.

Sellars, Beth. A Distinct Vernacular. Catalog, Convention Center, Seattle, Summer 1997.

Sellars, Beth. Interior Idioms. Catalog, Seafirst Gallery, November 1995.

Images Cover: Raging Heart, 2000. Encaustic, 15"x 15"x 4", private collection.

Center Panel: Belief #8, 2001. Encaustic, 12"x 48"x 3", collection of the artist.

Folded Inside Panel: String Game, 1998. Encaustic, 15"x 15"x 4", private collection.

This publication was funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign 2000-2001.

Š Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington 99258-0001.