Title: Sheila Klein, a solo exhibition
Dates: may 19 - June 30, 2000
Location: Consolidated Works, Seattle
Nominated as "Best Exhibition Outside of New York in an Alternative Venue, 2000" by the International Association of Art Critics (USA).
Curatorial Essay
It’s midnight and I’m gently swinging inside of Sheila Klein’s Float Zone #3, suspended from our 35’ ceiling. Wrapped in the golden light that illuminates the inside of the cocoon I feel safe and peaceful. To my left is a fortress - black, sleek and slightly imposing. To my right is a graceful, glowing “hammock” and a ruffled mousehole. From this drifting vantage-point a group of curvaceous sleeping bags appear to be migrating east across the cracked cement floor. Klein has transformed Consolidated’s raw warehouse space into a regal yet fantastically playful campsite.
Sheila is one of those rare individuals who always sees potential, viewing both intimate and public spaces as infinitely malleable. In the past she has dressed environments through the application of sculptural elements. With this new body of work it is clear that she has moved into constructing her own sacred spaces to be experienced from the inside out. Sheila’s work is about transformation – about transforming space and about creating a transformative intimate experience.
Recently Sheila stepped away from public works and buried herself in the studio, emerging months later with a large body of work currently on exhibition at two Seattle venues.
Her installation at Consolidated Works is touched by a sense of humor, but the individual sculptures have a powerful elegance derived from reducing the pieces in the accompanying exhibit to simple form and color. The works are line drawings realized in large-scale three-dimensionality. Stand is a 14’ tall fortress made of interlocking black Spandex pant forms. This piece is dignified but escapes Richard Serra-like austerity through the tenuous and slightly silly interaction of having to walk between the pant legs to enter into the center. Three luminous warm-toned tents, Float Zone 1, 2 and 3, hang from the ceiling at the center of the exhibition reflecting the strong negative space in Stand. Although womb-like and gentle, there is a potent juxtaposition to the feminine in the macho fabric choice of nylon football jersey. xxchip is a graceful wedge that rocks from side to side on a curved aluminum frame covered in suntan-toned pantyhose nylon. It is unsettling, and intimate in spite of its mammoth size. Mousehole tips the frame of xxchip on its side and covers the frame with silver ruffles inviting viewers to enter into a well-defined proscenium. Finally, a series of five space-age sleeping bags create a floor pattern at the back of the space that jars the exhibition with random placement in the midst of precisely positioned pieces.
Meanwhile across town in the main room at Seattle’s Esther Claypool Gallery Sheila exhibits a series of six large textile collages that surround the viewer creating an temple-like setting. Layers of overlapping squares and rectangles with surfaces of reds, golds and greens in a broad array of patterns and sheers, combine to create a balance of garish sensuality and exquisite richness. Sheila admits, “I was thinking of Mark Rothko while making these pieces. Hmm, is that him rolling over in his grave?” The adjoining room houses a collection of wall-mounted embroidery hoops stretching fabrics ranging from camouflage to rubberized net. At the end of that room are two pieces hung side by side made from pairs of Sheila’s father’s pants. The Esther Claypool exhibition, which is both personal and about material culture at large, is reminiscent in theme and execution to her early textile work.
Sheila’s irreverent and unconventional early works leaned heavily toward the domestic, challenging perceptions about women’s roles and the home environment through the creation of flamboyant sculptural furnishings and oversized personal objects like aprons and rouge pots. The layering of patterns and colors and the intense manipulation of fabrics, ranging from industrial to ethnographic, culminated in a bold and beautiful display of hedonistic, eye-popping, psychedelic complexity. The humor in these pieces is derived from their scale and outrageousness, but the underlying discomfort created by the tension of the twisted, wrapped, and knotted fabric demonstrating the tension of constrictive gender stereotypes helped the work transcend frivolity.
In the 1980’s and early 1990’s Sheila decided to dress the world, and proceeded to do so in gallery exhibitions and public works across the country. A giant necklace of blinking streetlights, presented as a wedding gift to the Statue of Liberty, was positioned outside Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas as part of Antoni Miralda’s well publicized project in which he married the Statue of Liberty to a statue in Barcelona of Christopher Columbus. Commemorative Ground Ring was commissioned by Sculpture Chicago in 1989 and incorporated familiar architectural elements from the city’s urban landscape as part of the “gemstone.” The whole notion of architectural jewelry applies a humanistic and primarily feminine trait to the urban landscape and defies the modernist sensibility that ornament is evil. Sheila describes herself as a crusader against banality and homogenization and the resulting works as femmetech. “Kind of like fixing an engine with a hairpin.”
For the last six years Sheila has been designing the Hollywood/Highland Metro Station, near Graumman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles with the architecture firm Dwarsky Associates. Sheila named the station Underground Girl. Subway trains float down long, round-ribbed tubes, letting passengers out in a concrete and metal womb. Fleshy pink light fixtures cast soft pools on the ceiling, and repetitive architectural elements step in curved motion down the platform. The station is not a box that’s been dressed. Underground Girl was designed from the beginning, (with architects known for creating conservative, corporate structures no less) to offer passengers the experience of metamorphosis, entering a cocoon-like structure before rising into the city.
Consolidated Works’ exhibition, like Underground Girl, involves an opportunity for viewers to not only observe the works, but also literally crawl inside of them, activating the participation. Within the yellow folds of Float Zone #3 my meditative state is broken by squeals and giggles coming from the maroon interior of Float Zone #2. I think Sheila would be pleased to know that the breadth of her accomplishments in the art, architecture and design communities, and twenty-five years of cumulative effort has resulted in simple responses of joy.
Sheila is one of those rare individuals who always sees potential, viewing both intimate and public spaces as infinitely malleable. In the past she has dressed environments through the application of sculptural elements. With this new body of work it is clear that she has moved into constructing her own sacred spaces to be experienced from the inside out. Sheila’s work is about transformation – about transforming space and about creating a transformative intimate experience.
Recently Sheila stepped away from public works and buried herself in the studio, emerging months later with a large body of work currently on exhibition at two Seattle venues.
Her installation at Consolidated Works is touched by a sense of humor, but the individual sculptures have a powerful elegance derived from reducing the pieces in the accompanying exhibit to simple form and color. The works are line drawings realized in large-scale three-dimensionality. Stand is a 14’ tall fortress made of interlocking black Spandex pant forms. This piece is dignified but escapes Richard Serra-like austerity through the tenuous and slightly silly interaction of having to walk between the pant legs to enter into the center. Three luminous warm-toned tents, Float Zone 1, 2 and 3, hang from the ceiling at the center of the exhibition reflecting the strong negative space in Stand. Although womb-like and gentle, there is a potent juxtaposition to the feminine in the macho fabric choice of nylon football jersey. xxchip is a graceful wedge that rocks from side to side on a curved aluminum frame covered in suntan-toned pantyhose nylon. It is unsettling, and intimate in spite of its mammoth size. Mousehole tips the frame of xxchip on its side and covers the frame with silver ruffles inviting viewers to enter into a well-defined proscenium. Finally, a series of five space-age sleeping bags create a floor pattern at the back of the space that jars the exhibition with random placement in the midst of precisely positioned pieces.
Meanwhile across town in the main room at Seattle’s Esther Claypool Gallery Sheila exhibits a series of six large textile collages that surround the viewer creating an temple-like setting. Layers of overlapping squares and rectangles with surfaces of reds, golds and greens in a broad array of patterns and sheers, combine to create a balance of garish sensuality and exquisite richness. Sheila admits, “I was thinking of Mark Rothko while making these pieces. Hmm, is that him rolling over in his grave?” The adjoining room houses a collection of wall-mounted embroidery hoops stretching fabrics ranging from camouflage to rubberized net. At the end of that room are two pieces hung side by side made from pairs of Sheila’s father’s pants. The Esther Claypool exhibition, which is both personal and about material culture at large, is reminiscent in theme and execution to her early textile work.
Sheila’s irreverent and unconventional early works leaned heavily toward the domestic, challenging perceptions about women’s roles and the home environment through the creation of flamboyant sculptural furnishings and oversized personal objects like aprons and rouge pots. The layering of patterns and colors and the intense manipulation of fabrics, ranging from industrial to ethnographic, culminated in a bold and beautiful display of hedonistic, eye-popping, psychedelic complexity. The humor in these pieces is derived from their scale and outrageousness, but the underlying discomfort created by the tension of the twisted, wrapped, and knotted fabric demonstrating the tension of constrictive gender stereotypes helped the work transcend frivolity.
In the 1980’s and early 1990’s Sheila decided to dress the world, and proceeded to do so in gallery exhibitions and public works across the country. A giant necklace of blinking streetlights, presented as a wedding gift to the Statue of Liberty, was positioned outside Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas as part of Antoni Miralda’s well publicized project in which he married the Statue of Liberty to a statue in Barcelona of Christopher Columbus. Commemorative Ground Ring was commissioned by Sculpture Chicago in 1989 and incorporated familiar architectural elements from the city’s urban landscape as part of the “gemstone.” The whole notion of architectural jewelry applies a humanistic and primarily feminine trait to the urban landscape and defies the modernist sensibility that ornament is evil. Sheila describes herself as a crusader against banality and homogenization and the resulting works as femmetech. “Kind of like fixing an engine with a hairpin.”
For the last six years Sheila has been designing the Hollywood/Highland Metro Station, near Graumman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles with the architecture firm Dwarsky Associates. Sheila named the station Underground Girl. Subway trains float down long, round-ribbed tubes, letting passengers out in a concrete and metal womb. Fleshy pink light fixtures cast soft pools on the ceiling, and repetitive architectural elements step in curved motion down the platform. The station is not a box that’s been dressed. Underground Girl was designed from the beginning, (with architects known for creating conservative, corporate structures no less) to offer passengers the experience of metamorphosis, entering a cocoon-like structure before rising into the city.
Consolidated Works’ exhibition, like Underground Girl, involves an opportunity for viewers to not only observe the works, but also literally crawl inside of them, activating the participation. Within the yellow folds of Float Zone #3 my meditative state is broken by squeals and giggles coming from the maroon interior of Float Zone #2. I think Sheila would be pleased to know that the breadth of her accomplishments in the art, architecture and design communities, and twenty-five years of cumulative effort has resulted in simple responses of joy.
