Vindauga

I had a photography professor in college who was adamant that if we turned in a series of work each piece had to stand on its own, no matter how well it worked as a series. Since Marylyn Dintenfass was done with her education in the sixties, I doubt she had the same professor, but nonetheless she has the same ethic for her grid pieces, each quadrant must be able to stand on its own and work with the other quadrants of the grid layout. I talked with Marylyn about her choice of the fourth quadrant, its meaning, and new work that was created specifically for her Work In Progress installation currently on display at the Mississippi Museum of Art.

When I began looking at Marylyn’s work I wanted there to be some simple hook I could recognize and use to explain all of her work. Her body of work spans forty years, and the mediums of ceramics, printmaking and painting. Although there is a stylistic use of a grid that runs through most of her work, the ideas that are presented and the syles in which they are presented encompass much more than one simple theme. Despite my want to explain the feminist ceramic installations and the micro-organic paintings and make it all fit in a neat little package, there isn’t a hook, but a life long body of work that is cohesive in its ideas. Marylyn discusses her transition from large scale ceramic works to the more minimalistic current paintings as a personal growth and increase in her own ability to convey a message with less. Her one stylistic constant, the grid layout, or use of separate panels within one piece, allows her to contrast or compliment the adjacent panels. She feels that this grid motif allows her to convey the similarities between the micro world and the macro world ( e.g. showing an abstraction based upon a organic objects at the cellular level beside an image derived from a cosmic view of a solar system).

At the Work In Progress installation the explanation for the fourth quadrant is printed on the wall. “The other element: is discovered, is reflected, is manipulated, is narrated, is dominated, is interpreted, is translated, is magnified, is multiplied, is simplified, is enhanced, is condensed, is appropriated, is attracted, is amplified, is enlarged, is applied, is inverted, is collapsed, is reduced, is rotated, is repeated, is complicated, is exuberant, is colorized.” [commas added] If you look at the grid pieces and don’t see all of these things, that’s okay, and I think Marylyn would be okay with it too. She is intrigued by the human capacity to take divergently different things away from the same experience. So, if you see the reflection and someone else sees appropriation, then Marylyn has demonstrated how we all experience things in different ways.

This dichotomy of experience is also echoed in her methods. She is a painstakingly detail oriented person, who manages to bring a feeling of spontaneity to her work. I asked Marylyn about the planning that went into this installation and the creative flexibility she demonstrated in the actual installation. She compared the process of planning versus improvisation to her paintings, “the work, it has this set format of the grid . . . but then within that it is very free and rich,” Marylyn also discussed how the grid is like the organization and comfort of her studio “and I am always happy to be in my own studio.” In the studio this same idea is manifest by the freedom to create that she feels within those boundaries. She lends a conceptual feeling of her studio to the space at the Mississippi Museum of Art through the installation of a grid of digital photos of her studio, which then has sketchbook pages, and in progress paintings tacked up or hung over the top of it.

I looked at the sketches on the wall, read the quickly jotted notes on tacked up pieces of paper, over-analyzed the titles, and still I had to ask Marylyn more questions about the significance and meaning of the fourth quadrant. Demonstrating more patience than I have ever had, she explained it to me another way “The fourth quadrant is kind of like, here is where you have the real scoop, here is a painting and if you peeled away the layers, just like everything in life . . . there is something behind that and the information could be something wonderful or dark and that is the idea of this other piece it is giving you information that you didn’t have.” As we began to discuss the selection of the image for the fourth quadrant, she explained “sometimes I choose it and sometimes it chooses itself.” She told me the story of her painting High Heater. It was partially complete, but still lacking the fourth quadrant, she brought a painting in to her studio which she had done at another location and it found its own home, “in an instance it made the piece, that is the part that is most exciting time because I don’t know how it is going tot turn out.”

One of the pieces I am most excited about in this show is Light O’ Lear. This piece was created specifically for the Work In Progress show. Marylyn planned it as a way to show her process of overlaying color in a conceptual way. She said she has been interested in working with light and wanted to be able to “de-construct the layers” of her paintings. This idea of the layers, which is present in her paintings, combines with the emphasis she puts on scale and space, and takes elements from previous installations where the work breaks the boundaries of the grid. When asked her about color overlays, she said, “I have to think about the way I want them to look like at the end, I have to map out how I am going to lay down the color , this was really more a way of sharing the idea of how translucent color laid down on top of one another changes . . . an important thing is to build and construct, I like to construct, I like to layer, it has a lot to do with the basic concept of what my work is about, that things are not what they seem . . . with people there is always a deeper layering, and that sense of layering is always important in my work.”

The exhibit Work in Progress: Marylyn Dintenfass will be on display at the Mississippi Museum of Art through October 15th.