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Publication Date: Friday, February 03, 2006 Metallic memories
Metallic memories
(February 03, 2006) In CSMA's latest sculpture exhibit, two women explore the past through clothing and food
By Molly Tanenbaum
Memory is a curious thing. Our pasts shape our futures and how we view the world around us, from places to people to art.
At the Community School of Music and Arts' latest exhibit, which opens Friday, two sculptors -- Whitney Couch and Nancy Youdelman -- play with memory, recasting common objects in new ways to create feelings of adoration, nostalgia and lost hope.
In both artists' works, memory exalts the ordinary and nourishes a desire to return to a simpler time.
Whitney Couch's works, entitled "Consuming the Divine," try to depict "a time when food was sacred," she said. Both in her three sculptures and in her jewelry pieces in this exhibit, she praises salt, wheat, grapes and potatoes, using both gold and silver to place a worshipful emphasis on the food.
The intent is to honor the staples that were once highly valued because of their roles as basic necessities, and some as religious symbols for the common man, but that are now taken for granted. In "The Plebian Potato," Couch sprouts gold out of potato eyes, hinting at their power and value, but also commenting on the potato's widespread use as a fast-food commodity.
The sculpture consists of a shiny silver bowl, which is nestled among the branches of a rust-brown potato plant. Couch draws our eyes to the bowl, but when we peer inside, it is surprising to find just a pile of potatoes, calling into question the way we regard them in our daily lives.
Couch's focus on food isn't by accident. Prior to earning a fine arts degree in metal arts from the California College of Arts in Oakland, she worked for six years as a pastry chef.
"To go from hungry to full is heavenly," Couch states in the description of her sculptures. "Flavors, aromas, tastes can be divine."
The Los Altos Hills native now uses the basement of her San Francisco home to create metal sculptures and jewelry, working with copper, silver and gold.
In the three necklaces Couch displays in "Consuming the Divine," she enshrines a salt-resin crystalline mixture in ornately carved gold. These necklaces look back to a time when salt had the same value as gold, Couch says, and the old-fashioned jewelry designs lend an added nostalgia to the work.
For Couch, it's food, but for Nancy Youdelman, it's clothing. Her 16 sculptures at CSMA, entitled "Clothing, Metaphor & Memory," adorn discarded women's clothing with found objects -- buttons, antique photographs, necklace chains, stationery, and also materials from nature.
Both the articles of clothing and the objects that decorate them are imbued with feelings of the past. Women and girls once wore those dresses and gloves, wrote those letters, collected those buttons.
In "Orphan," a mixed-media relief of a baby girl's dress is plastered in letters written to a mother on stationery from a home for widows and orphans, and is covered over with thin brown vines. The aging memories in this work are still visible through the vines, conveying a sense of something that was lost but still preserved in remembrance.
"For me, memories seem to be retained in vintage clothing, photographs and objects from the past -- an illusive but powerful essence that is the residue of forgotten lives," Youdelman remarks in her artist's statement.
Youdelman is a Fresno State graduate who was a part of the first feminist art class there in 1970. She also received art degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and UCLA, and has been showing her work all around California since the mid-1970s
Many of her works look bronzed, like one would do to baby shoes, though some are indeed sculpted from bronze and others are mixed-media made to look metallic. But some of the bronzing takes on the effect of armor that still has a feminine quality, perhaps protecting memories like a mother protects her children.
Both Youdelman and Couch's sculptures will be on display in CSMA's Mohr Gallery
through March 22.
E-mail Molly Tanenbaum at mtanenbaum@mv-voice.com
INFORMATION:
What: Sculpture exhibition: Works by Whitney Couch & Nancy Youdelman
Where: Community School of Music and Arts at Finn Center's Mohr Gallery,
230 San Antonio Circle, Mountain View
When: Artists' talks and opening reception on Friday, Feb. 3, 6 to 8 p.m.
Exhibit runs through March 22. Mohr Gallery is open Monday through Friday,
10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Cost: Free
For more information: Visit www.arts4all.org or call (650) 917-6800
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