GRACE ‘Focus’ exhibition focuses on family, other connections
By Janet Rems
Sonya A. Lawyer and Anna Fine Foer, the featured artists in the Greater Reston Arts Center’s first and only “Focus” exhibition of 2008, have a few key things in common.
“Both work from personal histories,” Joanne Bauer, GRACE exhibition curator, told the opening reception crowd last month.
Both, whose work was chosen from a field of about 50 proposals, also apply backgrounds in fiber arts to current work -- in Lawyer’s case, the aesthetics of quilting, and in Foer’s, the disciplines of textile conservation.
After that, the similarities end. Both Lawyer, who does mixed-media, and Foer, who creates intricate paper collages, work in vastly different creative universes, mirroring their equally different personal styles.
Words and complex ideas -- inspired as much by mathematics and metaphysics as art and imagination -- hurl from the voluble 50-year-old Foer like a tsunami hitting the beach (the subject of several of her works inspired by natural disasters).
Lawyer, 33, shy and intellectual, speaks quietly and deliberately about her process and how her deeply personal, family-inspired works slowly evolved.
There was no particular “a-ha moment” in the conception of Lawyer’s long-term, three-part series, “limit of disturbance,” which illuminates and honors images of people of color – her own heritage.
Lawyer’s mixed-media “quilts,” made from hand-dyed fabrics and vintage portrait photographs, emerged from three years of thought and experimentation.
Initial thinking about the project started with an album of old photographs found in the home of Lawyer’s paternal grandfather (Cyrus Jefferson Lawyer, born in 1913), which she and her father were cleaning out after her grandfather’s death. The find stimulated a thesis project for the master’s of fine arts in creative photography that Lawyer, a Howard University graduate from Ellicott City, Md., was completing at the time at the University of Florida.
A first stop, Lawyer recalled, was a visit to Vicksburg, Miss., to document the places related to her grandfather’s past. “That got me thinking about historical imagery,” she said.
First trying paint -- “which didn’t work for my purposes” -- Lawyer then hit upon using digital imagery. From quilting she was drawn to the impact of repeated images and the use of hand-dyed fabric.
“The repetition reinforces their authenticity. … They need to be repeated so they are remembered,” she explained.
The vintage photos, which “are the heart of the process,” are culled from albums found at online auctions and antique stores.
Part one of the series, “Searching for Beulah,” used all female images. Part two, “Finding Authenticity,” now on view at GRACE, is all men, including her late paternal and maternal grandfathers. The common thread of part three will be “madonna and child.”
Not all are relatives but are people who remind her of people in her life and who also might resonate with viewers, whatever their heritage. The common denominator for Lawyer is that they are “everyday people” whose images celebrate their innate pride and grace.
Foer’s vivid, layered collages explore “the visual connection between [the] physical and surreal.” They combine conceptual art, formal art concerns like bringing dimension and curves to the flat plane of the collage surface, the use of abstraction and the creation of imaginary landscapes.
Her inspiration comes from a myriad of sources -- among them recent climatic disasters, physics and mathematics, the spiritual world and Judaica, her own heritage.
A magazine ad featuring a large magnet, spied in her dentist’s office, as well as a conversation on National Public Radio about water levels in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina have triggered collage pieces.
Works like “Time and Space Continuum,” “Imagnetization,” “Fractal Faction Wave Action,” and “Sarcophagi Sumatra” are based on real science and real events. But she admits, there is nothing random in her work – “when reality wasn’t doing it for me, I made it up. … I don’t want to be stymied by what it’s supposed to be.”
Paper is Foer’s primary material, especially maps, which in her hands describe much more than a physical place. Using maps to blur boundaries and emphasize their man-made artificiality, Foer frequently adds tough political and philosophical considerations to her provocative mix.
The possessor of a bachelor's in fine arts in fiber art and a post-graduate certificate in textile conservation, Foer first became intrigued by maps as a student. On a plane trip across the United States, Foer -- who also studied in Paris and worked as a conservator in England, Israel and Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Museum before devoting herself to studio work in Annapolis, Md. -- compared the map in her hands to what she saw outside the aircraft.
The disconnect immediately captured her attention and continues to be a major catalyst for her work.
GRACE’s “Focus” exhibition is on view through Feb. 16.