May 28, 2004
Review of Helen Mirra at Peter Freeman Gallery
Here is a review of Helen Mirra's "Hewn Third," her recent solo exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc. It is to be published in the forthcoming issue of Untitled magazine, a British quarterly.
Over the last five years, Chicago-based artist Helen Mirra has established herself as one of the foremost practitioners of what Benjamin Buchloch once called dense minimalism. Her art is in synch with the formal qualities of 1960s Minimalist forebears yet inverts the ‘muteness’ of those artists’ works – with their resolute push of meaning outward onto the environment and viewer – by her use of materials and processes which load each of her objects with internal value. Mirra imbues her forms with notions of handicraft and labor, landscape, the body, and language; what results are restrained, formally elegant, and highly allusive fabric sculptures, drawings, text works, and films. They reward extended deliberation by acting as a prism through which to comprehend abstract concepts and disparate inferences. Sky-wreck (2001) is a telling example: it is an unfolded polyhedral form, with 110 triangular patches of fabric laid on the floor, each richly hand-dyed with indigo ink. The work folds together references to Dr. Bonner (inventor of the eponymous soap) and Paul Celan, R. Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion maps and geodesic domes, and Carl Andre’s sculpture Mons Veneris (1975). Occasionally the complexity (or obscurity) of her allusion is too tough a nut to crack, as in the abstruse philosophical references – here rendered in two languages as disjointed concrete poetry – of her recent typewriter ink-on-cotton works, but for the most part Mirra ably weds form and content. Her spare works are suffused with but not weighted down by their symbolic meaning.