Lissa Hunter: Objects & Other Stories
Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, New York
December 1 to 30, 1995

Review: Art In America, July 1996
Lissa Hunter at Nancy Margolis
by Janet Koplos

All the works Lissa Hunter showed at Margolis were geometric containers: boxes on the pedestals and box frames on the walls. These orderly structures are usually inset with less-regular objects—water-worn stones, small closed baskets covered with a smoothing layer of paper, twigs—while the surfaces are busy with ink marks that look like cursive text or with stitched raffia lines that may evoke numerical tallies.

“Letter from the Farm” is one of seven wall-hung frame pieces each just under a foot square and an inch and a half deep. The frame elements are about 3 inches wide, painted to resemble wood grain and punctured with rows of stiff green or yellow threads half an inch long. This stubble sweeps in one direction or anothe like short hair on a head or (given the titular clue) like growing crops. A rough-edged, apparently wooden, block covered with scribbled lines fills the frame; a smaller square is painted on this block and at the center of that is a dark-brown swatch of a thick substance (paper or fabric) pocked with indentations that make it resemble a miniature quilt or a dark cracker. The reiteration of a static form like a square could be utterly boring, but here the gentle and varied repetition seems warm and comfortable.

In others of the “Letter” series and also in larger works such as In the Beginning, a 40-by-12-inch wall piece, Hunter represents written language with paragraph-like clumps of short lines of scribbles and slashes. In this largish work (the biggest wall piece is 79 inches tall) a central dark channel holds a stack of hand-size, paper-covered closed baskets. One thinks of eggs in a trough or seeds in a furrow or, more speculatively, of the female genital cleft. Eggs and seeds are beginnings, and baskets can also symbolize beginning: they were probably the first man-made containers. Scattered across the frame in this piece are patches of interlaced raffia, which may represent another origin: the simplest textile construction.

“If All Else Fails,” another wall piece, is a working sketch. Inset at its center are nine little coiled baskets, base out. But these seem less significant than the drawings on the 4-inch-wide frame, which depict similar baskets—stacked like a spine, paired lip to lip, diagrammed, annotated. Here, too, Hunter offers the appearance of language in mysterious marks that provoke thoughts of whispered codes and secret knowledge. Yet the function of language must be important to her as well, for she supplied a gallery information sheet of stories that inspired her works. These anecdotes—the memory of a childhood friend’s kindness, her discovery that Ghanaian fishermen use the same net-mending techniques as those used in Maine, where she lives, irreligious ruminations—are funny, informative or emotionally revealing, and they give depth to the work. For her, the boxes may “hold” such histories. But the nonspecific allusiveness of forms and surfaces that deal with ordering, communication and generativity is quite sufficient in itself.

Janet Koplos, Senior Editor, Art In America