Histories, Erie Art Museum, Erie, Pennsylvania
September 12, 2003 to February 1, 2004

Review: American Craft, April/May 2004
by Richard Schindler

"Histories", the title of the Maine artist Lissa Hunter's exhibition, could as easily be "Appearances Can Be Deceiving." Her mixed-media pieces are deceptively simple and certainly disarming in their apparent emotional transparency. However, her art confidently traverses a wide terrain, from world politics and commerce through geological time and natural history to familial autobiography. Each work combines painstaking technique with a wealth of detail that, for the most part, feels intimate and profound.

Boxlike forms, constructed from paper- and plaster-covered fiberboard, function as frame, niche, shelf and ledge. Hunter’s use of trompe l’oeil transforms the surfaces of each work. Acrylic paint, pencil and occasional stitching mimic the effects of writing, veined natural textures and decorative wood surfaces. Hand-drawn images, illustrations, maps and transference prints are embedded within some of these surfaces. Many of the boxes enfold or support fragile vessels of coiled waxed linen or raffia made to look like miniature baskets, hand-thrown vases, carved wooden bottles or glazed ceramics.

The serial works offer a trenchant narrative on natural history. The seven-part Morse Mountain Suite, 2003, seems to be a relatively conventional homage to a nature preserve, celebrating such features as fog, woods, grasses, rocks and sun. Each piece, however, depicts the personal experience of a complex landscape, with the distinctive materiality of the named element in the foreground and a conceptual reference added as well. Night Sky, for example, delineates a painted image of a gradually darkening atmosphere across the planar surface of the main body of the work. A manifestation of the constellations merges above the box on a semicircular panel, resembling the zodiacal index of an illuminated manuscript. A dipper, literally a humorous aside, hangs from a peg inserted into the side of the painted container.

On the Origin of the Species, 2001, presents a transition in eight stages, from white egg-shaped vessel to a dark loam-colored square. The transformation is less cinematic (a series of static frames) than accretive (a gradual sift of viewpoint over time). A different sense of the passage of time informs Hymn, in which a russet-colored surface is partially worn to reveal serried rows of irregular triangles (reminiscent of the neumes of early musical notation). At the center, within a niche, stands a capped vessel of dark golden hue, suggesting the autumnal timbre of an ancient song of praise.

Treaty, 1999, the largest work in the exhibition, sets a tone of solemnity that slowly dissolves the closer one approaches. Penciled scrawls across the surface echo cursive script on yellowed parchment. The effect is one of quickly scanned text, the shape of words and flow of sentences suggested, yet never fully realized by the viewer. The bifurcated woven vessel enshrined within the upper register of the piece is loosely bound by a scrap of cloth, suggesting the fragile nature of a truce.

Not all the works are equally successful. Biography, 1999, a long shelf covered with similarly colored objects ostensibly representing the life of the artist's mother, resembles a photographic setup for the advance publicity of a Ken Burns-style documentary. More poignantly, Tribute (Mother), 1998, evokes a piercing sense of loss and faded memory through its smudged white surface, as if a text had been imperfectly erased. A small beaded bowl sits quietly within its shallow niche. In a row above it hang a key, several folded decorative notepapers and a slender brush. They suggest secrets yet to be unlocked or hoped-for messages unrevealed. Several rounded stones lie on top of the work, as they do in the work Old Soul, 1999, in reference to the Judaic tradition of placing stones on a grave. Hunter excels at these muted testaments to time and memory, conveying an elegiac mood resonant with unspoken meanings.

Richard A. Schindler is an associate professor of art history at Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania