‘Flutter: New Works by Connie Arismendi’
Mexican American Cultural Center Gallery
Through Nov. 28
Connie Arismendi’s new exhibition “Flutter” at the Mexican American Cultural Center is said to be “an installation based on healing.”
How strange to find, in a city that’s long been saturated with a cloying flood of New Age treacle and redolent of breathing hazards born of smudge-sticks brandished by well-intentioned seekers whose college roommate’s mother’s best friend may or may not have been one-fourth Ojibwa, an exhibition that seems not only capable of actual healing but that also rewards a less woo-woo sense of aesthetics. That will reward, we daresay, the most refined sense of aesthetics and any art-loving eyes hungry for elegance, grace, and architectural integrity.
Arismendi’s been working for years with delicate fabric, eventually framed or draped, as the field upon which to flower her excellently drafted drawings and paintings. She’s also worked with heavier, more industrial material that she cuts and shapes to suit the least industrial and most spiritual of purposes – not unlike that of her 2009 Art in Public Places homage to Cesar Chavez, Rayo de Esperanza – A Beacon of Hope, which ignites the night outside Austin’s Terrazas Branch Library.
“Flutter” is preceded, in the small vestibule of the MACC gallery, by a brief array of Arismendi’s older, less airy works: painted figurative silhouettes intricately cut from sheets of thick aluminum, the painting of a stag beetle backgrounded by floral elements. Then you walk into the main part of the gallery, and the ceiling of the enormous white room soars a dozen or so yards above your head to frame sun-streaming skylights. It’s like you’ve entered some hangar reserved for angels with the wingspan of a Boeing 747. What’s in this heavenly hangar could’ve been crafted by angels and perfectly suits the stark expanse.
Here’s the main installation: Love Reign O’er Me. Several frozen cascades of white Mylar shapes hang from the ceiling on transparent threads; the shapes are like those Victorian flourishes representing leaves and vines along the margins of Godey’s Lady’s Book, and they fall almost to the floor. A series of white concentric circles on that polished floor suggests that bits of the flourishes have already fallen and will continue to fall. In the midst of this static downpour of translucent beauty, grounded between circles, is a curved and narrow bed that you’re invited (it says so right on the nearby wall) to recline and relax upon. Do that, and you’re looking way up at the centerpiece of this massive yet delicate installation: a dangling swarm of translucent leaf-shapes upon which have been painted (in precise natural colors) various butterflies and the caterpillars thereof. Lie there for a few minutes, taking the beauty in, and, let me tell you, something is going to heal.
There’s also Falling Tears, a similarly hanging installation that incorporates hundreds of Swarovski crystal teardrops suspended above a water-filled vessel that’s six feet across, and A thing that you need … which glorifies the west wall of the gallery with a two-dimensional, cut-from-Lexan, gorgeously calligraphed work embodying that old chestnut about how every cloud has a silver lining. There’s no wink-nudge irony to this piece or any of the others on display; this and they are works of deep sincerity, rendered with technical expertise and a sense of design equal to those who make the covers of the best books worthy of judging their insides by. If this show were an actual book, its cover would be designed by Chip Kidd and Marian Bantjes and just the sight of it would make the ghosts of Gandhi and Jesus and William Morris smile. A book of healing? We gladly recommend, especially as we’re all walking wounded on some level or another, that you check it out.
This article appears in swine flu.