The
first time I met Sheila Klein, I knew she would alter the way I saw
the world - for the better. I had been asked by the Regional Arts
and Culture Council to serve on a jury for a small public art commission
for an ignominious government building in downtown Portland. The location
was Multnomah County's Mead Building (421 S.W. Fifth Avenue), a rather
drab office space; the site was a large picture window that allowed
a gaping view into the building lobby. But here was the glitch: The
Mead Building is actually a wayside in county corrections, a place
where People report to their parole or probation officers, where individuals
submit to blood and urine tests. Protecting the privacy of those using
the building was paramount in the design requirements; sparing the
street pedestrians a dismal view of the security guard and metal detector
in the lobby was another consideration. Making art for a place where
people would rather not have to go seemed a Herculean proposal in
itself. As Klein herself commented, the Mead Building project was
small compared to the scale she typically works in. The size of the
window was a mere 10 x 20 x 8 feet; the budget was only $40,000 -
small by public art standards. But Something about the design limitations
spurred Klein to enter the competition. In her initial letter of interest,
she wrote:
I
work on projects by pointing out relationships. Retranslating and
transforming information and then giving it a visual order is a
goal of my work. I imply ideas dealing with experience which are
meant to create hope, wonder, and remind us of the potential magic
of the environment. Collaborating with the circumstances of the
situation generally yields results... I am a crusader for giving
the city some living room. Making the city a home full of places
you want to be. I am a eradicator of the banal, boring, and bland.
Yet, I love the pedestrian. I truly believe the city is a kind of
Oz.
The
jury was hooked. We were fascinated, hopeful, and optimistic that
Klein could produce a piece that would meet or exceed the difficult
design criteria. Klein's ultimate solution is a permanent installation
called Show and Hide, a theatrical and kinetic piece involving
multiple layers of drapes and shades that constantly open and close
to create ever-changing patterns, a pun on the notion of "window
dressing." The fabrics Klein used for the drapes are tough, techy
materials, the kind used for high-performance athletic gear The motorized
mechanisms that operate the horizontal opening-and-closing of the
drapes as well as the vertical up-and-down of the shades are computer-controlled
to create different patterns of layers. Sometimes the curtains form
strong blocks of color; at other times the fabrics merge to create
mesmerizing moire effects. Klein's installation effectively protects
the dignity of those who use the building while providing a droll
view for pedestrian and vehicular traffic outside. As Klein describes
Show and Hide, "The retail window isn't selling anything
on display and the interior doesn't stay in its place."
Klein has built a career out of jolting the urban arena with visual
wit and beauty. Since the 1980's she has been involved in major, high-profile
art installations with a crossover to architecture and design. For
most of the 1990's Klein was designing the Hollywood/Highland Metro
Station, the subway stop near Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles.
She worked with the architectural firm Dworsky Associates from the
inception of the subway plan to ensure that her installation melded
with the architecture. In fact, Klein's work, Underground Girl
(1999), is the architecture. As one descends from the street into
the subway tunnel, Klein's pendant piece, ICU2, projects giant
images of Klein's own eyes (with morphing irises), coyly winking and
blinking at the passengers. For those who are disembarking at the
station, the entire platform has been transformed into a visage of
the interior of a woman's body. The support beams and struts evoke
an architectural pelvis in curvaceous uterine forms, while soft pink
light creates a subtle fleshy quality. The passage from subway tunnel
to street side becomes a metaphorical birthing from the depths underground
into the light of day above.
Klein has quipped, "I want to dress the world," and much
of her public work takes that motto literally. Starting in 1983, she
began playing around with photomontages that combined landmarks with
architectural embellishments - a building draped with a necklace,
for example. By 1989, Klein reached an important milestone in her
career, which allowed her to test her ideas on a much grander scale.
She was chosen to participate in Sculpture Chicago with a massive
outdoor piece called Commemorative Ground Ring. The work was
made of sandblasted, polished, and etched aluminum and featured architectural
details appropriate from Chicago's best-loved monuments. Sited on
the ground, the Ring looked as if it had just fallen off some gigantic
finger. The piece was eventually purchased for the Chicago Historical
Society by the Miro Fund.
From Sculpture Chicago, Klein's quest to accessorize the urban landscape
became even more ambitious. She Began tinkering with stock industrial
materials, traffic lights in particular. Klein recalls how, when living
in Los Angeles, as she drove home from the studio late at night along
La Cienega Boulevard, she would see the traffic lights as emeralds,
rubies, and topazes of the street. For her first experiment in traffic
lights-cum sculpture, Klein fabricated Traffic Necklace, an
immense "accessory" meant to drape a building facade. This
was an opportunity for Klein to actualize a piece that had existed
previously only in photomontage form. The Spanish artist Antoni Miralda
knew of Klein's idea and encouraged her to build Traffic Necklace
as a contribution to his Honeymoon Project, the conceptual,
ongoing performance piece Miralda orchestrated to "marry"
the Statue of Liberty in New York to the statue of Christopher Columbus
in Barcelona. Klein's architectural riviere was meant as a "wedding
gift" for the actual ceremony, which took place in 1992 in Red
Rock Canyon, just outside of Las Vegas. For about two weeks, Traffic
Necklace adorned the Aladdin Casino on the Strip.
During the same year Klein was selected to participate in an exhibition
called One Nine Special, a temporary exhibition housed in Union
Station in Los Angeles. There Klein created an enormous cincture out
of red, green,and amber traffic lights/gems; she called it Urban
in reference to the idea that even the urban landscape deserves indulgent
embellishment. In the Lewis & Clark College exhibition, Urban
is sited in a sunken garden just south of Fields Center for the Visual
Arts, looking like a fancy cocktail ring housed in a grassy jewel
box.
Klein's fascination with the use of industrial lighting and materials
continued with another major commission. In 1992 Klein was selected
to create a project for the Federal Aviation Agency traffic control
tower at the Los Angeles International Airport. Playing off the masculine
image of the tower, Klein "femmed" the structure by applying
a 17-by-20-foot blinking, egg-shaped medallion that protrudes off
the tower like an exploded rose window. The piece, XX Marks the
Spot (completed in 1996), represents a belly, or a breast, or
a universe of sorts, completely self-contained. Within the bulge is
a graphic made from 250 runway light programmed to change every second
in 60-second cycles to form a series of patterns based on the imagery
of air traffic coupled with an abstraction of the endangered El Segundo
butterfly, which lives on the dunes west of the airport.
Even as recently as this year, Klein has been making/building anthropomorphic
jewelry-sculpture to grace Southern California palms. Two Klein installations
were included in a temporary outdoor exhibition along Santa Monica
Boulevard in the city of West Hollywood. Pierced Palm (2202)
is a stainless steel and aluminum loop that "pierces" the
trunk of a palm tree, resembling an exotic, arboreal nose ring. Its
sister piece, Palm Ear (2002), is similarly an adorned palm
tree with two teardrop bobs of stainless steel and aluminum hanging
from the tree fronds.
Currently Klein is at work on Leopard Sky, a site concept for
the international arrivals roadway at the George Bush Intercontinental
Airport in Houston. It is leopard print rendered as architecture.
In this work, which will be installed on the ceiling of a covered
auto passage, Klein has conceived a three-dimensional pattern in animal
spots. the work consists of a backdrop of a denim like graphic that
completes panels of leopard spots sequined with convex traffic morrow
and lights. Who would think that dressing the world could be so glamorous?
Critics have called Klein a "pop artist," but that term
is far too limited to describe the breadth and scope of Klein's vision.
In fact, Klein bristles at any label that pigeonholes an artist too
narrowly. In an attempt to describe her art form, Klein characteristically
devised a visual tool. She divided a pie chart equally into sections:
Art, Architecture, Sculpture, Textiles, Design, Installations, Fashion,
and Theatre. Slicing through the boundaries of all these denominations
is a spiral spelling out "sheila sheila sheila sheila."
In light of the range of art Klein has created, one might wonder if
the artist is capable of working in a more intimate scale. Indeed,
Objects Between Subjects at the Gallery of Contemporary Art
at Lewis & Clark College proves that Klein's acute wit and technical
bravura are equally well-matched to more human-scale objects. At the
exhibition entrance, located in the Alumni Circle of the College campus,
is Strand (2000), a hengelike ring constructed of nylon Lycra
stretched over a steel frame. Upon closer look one notices that the
stretched fabric forms paris of pants that create colonnade around
the circle. Like many of Klein's works, Stand serves both as
sculpture to observe and as structure to inhabit. Standing nine feet
high, Stand fells both protective (like a fortress) and fanciful
(like a playground structure).
If Stand exudes masculine qualities in iconography, color,
and scale, then Klein's most recent work, Bonnet Nave (2202),
is the yin to Stand's yang. Bonnet Nave evolved out
of a series she produced in 2001 called Rain Bonnets. Klein
was destined to receive an vintage plastic rain bonnet - the kind
our mothers used to buy from Woolworth's and keep in their purse in
case of a downpour - from a friend who was cleaning out her aunt's
attic. The rain bonnet had never been worn and still sported an auspicious
price tag - $.99 from S. Klein on Union Square. This modest item spawned
leaps of associations for Klein about the shape of those old rain
bonnets: how they look so much like a proscenium arch; how they were
part shelter and part accessory; how something as simple as a head
covering can define a moment or monument in time. With Rain Bonnets
Klein exploded the traditional idea and started to make several bonnets
that were drastically supersized yet still, oddly, usable in a theatrical
way.
From this sprang Bonnet Nave, a nearly roomsize "rain
bonnet" made of polyester organza and nylon mesh over an aluminum
armature. The purple, mauve, and pink fabrics drape the frame in the
most sensuous and voluptuous folds. From the back the work resembles
some ancient, hulking, mammothlike beast, or the back of a hunched
crone. From the front one realizes that Bonnet Nave is a structure;
there is an entrance to a womblike space, a play-cave, a shelter from
some imaginary storm. When Klein exhibited Bonnet Nave at the Edison
Eye Gallery near her hometown of Bow, Washington, last spring, people
kept approaching her with their own interpretations of the work. Their
comments displayed a variety of ethnic, religious, and feminine associations:
Bonnet Nave conjured a babushka, a snood, a wimple, a mantilla,
a shawl, a cowl, a shroud, a burqa.
A pervasive theme in Klein's work is the notion of envelopment. For
this exhibition, Klein has installed three works she calls Floatzone
Capsules. These are ten-foot-tall tents or pods made of nylon
mesh that hang from the gallery ceiling and hover a few inches off
the floor. Visitors are welcome to climb into a Floatzone Capsule
(each work could structurally hold at least two people) and experience
the feeling of being supported in space. Each Floatzone Capsule
can be gently swung to and fro, spin on its single axis attached to
the ceiling, or hang still. The visitor determines how active or passive
the piece will be.
Klein is highly aware that her work explores useful objects with imaginary
purpose, and she encourages her audience to experiment. Klein's space-agey
foam Pillow Planet (2002), for example, are intended to be
taken off their shelves, hugged, and lounged upon - "teddy bears
for the 21st century," Klein remarks. Phoam, Phoam
Mat Island, and Phoam Cloud Curtain playfully suggest mini
environments and experiences, like floating on a pond in springtime.
Each work is meant to pique the visitor's ability to fantasize. It
is possible that for each "phoam" Pillow there is a human
Le Petit Prince to inhabit Klein's quixotic planet.
Other objects in the exhibition invite further queries into form and
supposed function. Hassock Column (2001) is a vertical pile
of five foam-and-galvanized-steel ottomans that create an elegant
column, yet individually each hassock is designed for comfortable
sitting. Still other works in Objects Between Subjects are
more personal expressions of design. Trying Once Again to Make
The Connection Between All Things (1996) is a sophisticated graphic
wall sculpture made entirely of intermeshed coat hangers. My Pants,
My Dad's Pants (1999) is the most self-referential work in the
exhibition. After Klein's father died, the artist kept some of his
clothes, then eventually decided to rivet them against her own discarded
trousers. The effect is a portrait of father and daughter, expressed
by the overlapping two pairs of pants. My Pants, My Dad's Pants
was developed at the same time as Stand, evidence of the
level to which Klein explores spatial and environmental relationships.
Klein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but as a self-professed
"gypsy," she has lived in Israel, Mexico, Los Angeles, and
Ojai, California, with several stops in Seattle and northern Washington.
She now resides in Bow, a post office-only town in the bucolic Skagit
Valley of Washington state, about 60 miles north of Seattle. She lives
there on a farm with her husband, artist Ries Niemi, and her sons,
Rebar and Torque. Her remove from the more bustling arts communities
of metropolitan America does not prevent her in the least from playing
on a grand stage to an international audience, specially when it comes
to major public arts commissions. Klein defies the usual definitions
of "Northwest artist" in favor of her own hybrid as an artist
working on the global level.
So what do Bonnet Nave or a Floatzone Capsule or a Pillow
Planet have in common with massive architectural jewelry or an
exotic mirrored animal print? "I guess I envision a different
kind or world visually, and I am building it a little at a time,"
Klein says. Although few of Klein's works are figurative, all of her
pieces imply human adjacency. Each work serves to cozy up its surroundings
and lend humor and humanity to its environment. Each piece describes
a play between material, process, and concept; each object exudes
a tension between overload and elegance, simplicity and complexity,
aesthetic pleasure and mind-bending. I once heard Klein remark that,
for most people, two plus two equals four, but for an artist, two
plus two equals purple. Klein amplifies that equation.
Linda
Brady Tesner, Director
Gallery of Contemporary Art
Lewis & Clark College
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