Held in Suspension

Mattie O.: Held in Suspension

Foothills Art Center

809 15th Street, Golden, CO 80401

July 31-Oct. 25, 2020

Admission: Free

Review by Lauren Shults

At the Foothills Art Center in Golden, artist Mattie O.’s solo exhibition Held in Suspension represents the lives of women caught within strictly prescribed ways of how to present themselves. There is “ugliness in the world,” she posits in her statement, “but there still can be beauty.” The beauty, though imposed, is “held in suspension,” showing the delicate tension between fashioning one’s self into what society wants a woman to look like versus self-expression free of these expectations.

Made up primarily of sculptures of dresses, the exhibit displays a range of feminine attire from traditional gowns to revealing, fanciful costumes. The dresses are constructed using wire armatures covered in a paper produced by the artist with abacá—a fiber created from the leaves of wild banana trees. Though this natural material is fragile, the dresses represent women in their solid being.

Mattie O., Candy Wrappers, abacá fiber, balsa wood, wood dowels, crochet thread, and acrylic paint, 35 inches tall x 41 inches in diameter. Image by DARIA.

One of the first works you encounter in the exhibition is titled Candy Wrappers and it refers to the women who accused Harvey Weinstein of rape. On a slowly turning mobile, miniature, framed dresses pass by. The artist crafted these garments with the abacá fiber paper and painted them with “interference” acrylic, which creates a metallic finish like a candy wrapper. In the middle of the simple frames, the dresses appear agonizingly bound in. Some of the dresses depict the clothing of real women in the trials and some are imagined by Mattie O.

Mattie O., Kiki’s Walk in the Woods Dress, abacá fiber, green kyanite, chrysocolla beads, enameled copper wire, copper grommets, velvet cord, acrylic paint, and resin. Image by DARIA.

In the next room, there is a cautionary message on the wall: to be mindful of the fragile dresses hanging throughout the rooms. The life-sized dresses gently turn, in fact, due to the slight movement of air you create as you walk through the space. Many of the titles of these pieces refer to dresses for particular occasions for “Kiki.” According to the artist, “Kiki” comes from the name of the dress form mannequin used to mold the sculptural garments. Kiki’s Walk in the Wood Dress, for example, features a green and gold latticed skirt with a gemstone-fringed and velvet-strung bodice, recalling wet moss and an enchanted forest.

In the foreground: Mattie O., Fergi’s Social Distancing Dress, abacá fiber, antique watch, windowpane oyster shells, horseshoe nails, glass fruit, iron rod, steel wire, steel chain, and acrylic paint. Image by DARIA.

Fergi’s Social Distancing Dress, in the same gallery, consists of nails poking through the outer layers of the dress, freshwater pearls, an interior covered in blue crystals, and a skirt of large, flat oyster shells punctured by wires that flair out around the implied body, making you keep your distance. A watch on a chain dangling from the dress’s hanger seems to refer to time being out of joint in 2020—as the title card says “Time is elastic during lockdown”—while also a nod to Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

Mattie O., Kiki’s Kintsugi Dress, abacá fiber, freshwater pearls, brass wire, resin, and acrylic paint. Image by DARIA.

In the foreground: Mattie O., Kiki’s Seeds of Gold Dress, abacá fiber, hand-woven brass wire, aspen branch, and acrylic paint. Image by DARIA.

In another room, Mattie O. has created a collection of Venus figures. Kiki’s Kintsugi Dress has an abacá bodice that evokes the familiar Venus de Milo torso, but pierced with holes filled with interlaced brass wire and pearls. Kintsugi is the Japanese practice of mending broken ceramics with gold lacquer, thus highlighting rather the hiding the repair. Kiki’s Seeds of Gold Dress appears to be the precursor or previous stage of the Kintsugui Dress, with its interwoven brass wire covered only sparsely in abacá, seemingly sprouting from white seeds like a fringe along the bottom hem.

A view of Mattie O., Laundry Room, abacá fiber, steel wire, acrylic paint, and wood and glass beads. Image by DARIA.

Departing from the fantastical attire, in the final gallery Mattie O. stops to consider what women wear ordinarily. From a T-shirt featuring a peace sign to Mondrian and Yves Saint Laurent-inspired suit sets, masks, and funky bikinis, the artist seems to pay homage to fashion history from the 1950s-60s to the present. Titled Laundry Room, the individual pieces hang somewhat lifeless, like laundry drying on a line, in contrast to the illusory bodies evoked in the previous works. The humor of this real world scene of women’s clothing seems empowering in a different way, celebrating women’s fashion choices that represent liberation from past constraints and strides toward self-actualization.

Held in Suspension is on view through October 25 and is well worth a trip to Golden.

Lauren Shults is a recent graduate of the University of Denver with a Bachelor of Arts degree in strategic communications and marketing. She has a fine arts background and training from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, concentrating on sculpture and photography in her art practice.