Veiny, Nesty, Whorly
The world is invisible to us until we are ready to see it.
We notice an occasional sparrow but with time and focus we could discover a vast avian economy that cohabits our towns. An artist is someone who has trained in the skill of paying attention when a breach forms in the everyday and a glimpse of something profound and overlooked comes into focus. This is called research; it is also called inspiration. For Julia Couzens this experience happened most recently on a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. She was intending to visit one show but found herself instead at another: an exhibition of large-scale antique European lace. She was transfixed. Couzens still speaks with an emotion-filled vocabulary of the thrilling "liney, nesty, webby, veiny, fingerprint-whorl" works she found there. Couzens was open to being carried away like that because her facility with drawing was no longer satisfying her; she needed something less predictably artful and complete.
Colored masking tape is ubiquitous behind-the-scenes in the art world. It is used to temporarily place paper on walls or on other pieces of paper; its very light tackiness enables it to be moved frequently without tearing the work, or leaving stains. Couzens noticed just such a roll of tape in her studio shortly after her Chicago experience, and it occurred to her that she might cut narrow strips of black tape and make drawings with that. It would require her to learn a new skill, and the concomitant need to pay close attention would end her dissatisfaction with what she felt were rote and boring techniques she knew too well.
The resulting works were, and are, a wonder. The earliest ones are entirely abstract, with branch-like lines sparingly attached to white paper. With their vast patches of ground they're like late de Kooning paintings, with isolated brush strokes in a sea of thoughtful restraint. The lines are crisp and decisive and minute touches of color balance their austerity. Another parallel is the recent work of Jim Melchert, the renowned Bay Area artist and sometime ceramicist who has been making works that use off-white commercial tiles. He drops them from short heights, resulting in networks of cracks; Melchert then inserts colored glazes wherever two cracks meet. Couzens adds dots and dashes of blue tape equally strategically. Their art is markedly similar: webs and tangles of gorgeous lines in which color appearances are events beyond what their modest presence might predict. Iron filings are used to make invisible magnetic lines visible; Couzens thinks of these drawings as "filings" that make invisible emotional and aesthetic choices visible.
Most artists have clear signs on their shop windows as you stroll past on the street: Digital Photographer; Conceptual Sculptor; Plein Air Painter. There's no sign on Couzens's building. Despite a long and celebrated career Couzens does not have a signature style; she's worked with drawing, sculpture, installation, painting in myriad ways. Like many artists today, she uses whatever medium helps her best solve the problem on which she is working. To some extent she could also be considered an artists' artist. That is, she has the respect of her peers, and students, and a circle of collectors for her consistently intelligent and rigorous body of work, but a wider general public is less aware of her work than would be expected given the level of professional esteem in which her work is held. The status of not having a signature style and being an artist's artist is not a comfortable one. It contains an inherent mixed-message that is a formula for discontent. Many artists fall into that category because they make work that: entails skills that are hard to appreciate by non-practitioners; is dry, esoteric or plain; is particularly hard to live with for collectors; demonstrates a breakthrough insight that is not yet understood outside of the world of artists; or is of great subtlety. Most artists at some time fall into these categories, including Couzens. Time will tell if the work in the current show, Maidment, marks a signature development in her work, one that might clearly define Couzenshood for her followers.
Maidment is a pun of sorts. Couzens came across it in the title of a book about textile art and inferred a meaning about handmade, fabric-based work long associated with women's craft. Later she discovered that it was actually the name of a significant collector and writer in the field. There are three major new tape drawings included in the exhibition, each roughly 18 inches by 24, in black and blue. These flirt with representation; one can readily impose landscape, tree trunks and the like on these innocent convocations of lines, averaging between half an inch and one inch wide. A piece that flows vertically suggests a close-up of trees, perhaps gnawed halfway up by beavers. A horizontal piece suggests harvested logs floating downstream; a third has more jagged internal borders suggesting cut-up technique. The viewer must work to remember that Couzens is drawing with scissors, that these effortless lines are in fact the result of the most skillful heights that only a mature artist can achieve. Suggestive or abstract, these works are unlike anything Couzens, or anyone else, has shown in recent years, and are, undeniably, lovely.
One subtext of the show is the effect on lines of being rendered, respectively, in two and three dimensions. Couzens has continued her investigation of (paper-tape) lines with three sculptures by swathing acres of string and related binding and stretchy material around metal grids she makes. This kind of wrapping is a form most often associated with outsider artists, such as the late Bay Area artist Judith Scott. There are two ways to approach the form: one is to obscure an object held inside, creating the allure of time capsules or other suggestive hidden-treasure containers, the consummate example of which would be Pandora's box. The other approach is for the surface of the object to be the purpose of the work, both in its form and its texture. The latter is Couzens's approach. In the first new sculpture, Unspooled and Tricked Out, Couzens has barreled her car right through the "Caution Detour" barrier and come to a crashing stop on Excess Avenue just off Discomfit Street. It's a hoot. Evocative of god's eyes and dream catchers from New Age art, in a marriage with cat's cradles, her surface is redolent with memories of tangled fishing line, a mattress tied to the roof of a small car by improvised cords, and overly enthusiastic stitching on blue jeans. Couzens designs all of this, so that it becomes an essay about the taxonomy of line: clashing textures, lengths and shapes, all compounded by an inherently garish commercial color palette. A drawn line is a narrative and in this and the second sculpture, French With a Twist, the narrative dips, turns corners, goes into caves and travels alongside counter narratives. There are stories that are interrupted and overwhelmed by contradictory stories. The operative word is improvisation and the motivation is "emergency response."
French With a Twist is much like the masterwork Edward Weston photograph, Shell and rock arrangement, (1931), in which the glowing white interior of the shell dominates the dusky outside world of beach and stone. An inwardly curving work, with browns and other dark shades on its exterior, it explodes from inside with brilliant yellows. Both lead up to the third sculpture, a masterwork of her own, titled WT, DJ, JS and Franz. The piece is deeply, startlingly black, with internal tectonic slippages. Tiny inches of blue, yellow and red emerge from its depths with longer study. It's as though she had reached into a wall and pulled out an Anish Kapoor and put it on a pedestal without losing any of its depth and inwardness.
Finally, Couzens shows a curtain work some 90 inches square, made of the walls and bases of green plastic berry baskets, broken and edited into almost unrecognizable squares, all different as snowflakes. The wall behind is partially painted a lime green parallel to but more subtle than the plastic, affording the work an ephemeral green light bouncing back and forth between the wall and the art work. Couzens here pursues another aspect of line: less hand-made, more rigid, a semaphore of short barking utterances with subtle changes from phoneme to phoneme—as opposed to the drawings and sculpture surfaces made up of long discursive sentences. In all cases the language of the message is clear: you're in the presence of a rigorous and not uncourageous artist in her prime.