Fire and Water at Fireplace Project
Maia Ruth Lee and Peter Sutherland, an artistic couple with varying viewpoints and methods, have individual shows at the Fireplace Project in Springs, both of which seem reflective of the country’s mood on the eve of a divisive presidential election and in the wake of a global wave of violence and uncertainty.
In a show called “Santa Carla,” Mr. Sutherland’s benches and wall pieces smolder with flames, fireworks, and sunsets (or are they sunrises?) as subjects. The colors are fiery reds and oranges, presented through screens that give them the optical quality of road signs. The town it references in California is known primarily as the setting for the 1987 movie “The Lost Boys,” about a beach town beset by violence and vampires.
Fiery rhetoric, gunfire, explosions — all of these themes from recent world events appear here. In previous works involving benches, Mr. Sutherland used sweeping panoramas of Western landscapes. Here, the benches called “Kingsford” are tinted a charcoal carbon black, with seat backs that depict a leaping conflagration. The idea that a seat, a place of respite and comfort, could spontaneously combust offers a sense of the suddenness and randomness of terrorism.
Only the images of fishing lures, in happy colors, printed on vinyl and mounted on a rock face, offer some relief from the implied threat and hell-scape Mr. Sutherland has devised. The heat wave outside just makes it smolder more.
In this environment, it seems no accident that Ms. Lee’s show is called “Casual Water.” But even here, she implies the water is temporary, a puddle that will eventually evaporate, as “casual water” is defined on a golf course.
It is not abundantly clear what her wrought-iron wall sculptures have to do with H2O, but they are pretty and decorative. Their forms are glyphs, devices of personal meaning that might be language, or symbols, or her own lexicon.
She said in an interview that her Korean parents are Bible translators in Nepal and had to develop their own alphabet for the oral language of Sherpa, an experience that awakened her to the visual possibilities of designing these types of symbols for her art.
The shapes and forms of these works are taken from older building decorations with her own spin. Some look like classic metal pub games and seem engaging. Others have a more threatening presence, like symbols of a saint’s martyrdom or a voodoo doll. The titles also offer a vague unease. “Everyman for Himself” points with a dagger downward in a symbol that might be taken for abstracted male genitalia or a mix of female and male reproductive organs.
The title “Going Up?” for a piece that looks like an old elevator monitor has a binary meaning as well. Is it an invitation, a mixed promise, or a veiled threat? It’s almost a relief when one piece is simply called “Welded Composition.” It takes the pressure off imagining what perils it might imply.
It’s telling that none of these glyphs made it onto her chart of “Auspicious Glyphs of 2016.” Perhaps it is because they were not realized yet, but the suggestion that they are otherwise gives them a darker presence.
Mostly, however, the installation is peaceful and quiet, an effective balm for the fire and brimstone in the other room, and the suggestions otherwise can be hummed out of one’s head.
Even if it wasn’t intentional to hold the shows during the two political party conventions this summer, the timing is perfect. The art makes you feel like the random thoughts and visions of apocalypse running through your head all month aren’t so crazy after all; that maybe we are all going through our own reckoning, hopefully in time to save us.
The show remains on view through Aug. 15.