Juxtapoz Journal – Repairs: Anne Buckwalter and Sarah Miska @ Micki Meng, San Francisco


One of many reveals that opened final week on the West Coast that excited us was the duo solo present of Sarah Miska and Anne Buckwalter in Repairs at Micki Meng in San Francisco. 

All the pieces tends in direction of entropy. Development turns into overgrowth after which decays. Dealing with life’s numerous tangled messes, the necessity to handle oneself, one’s residence, and one’s dependents is at all times current, or quick approaching. Making and preserving order is actual, usually gendered work, and such upkeep work is fixed, setting the tempo of day by day routine in methods each self-sustaining and exhausting. As divergent portraits of life because it’s lived, Sarah Miska and Anne Buckwalter’s work gathered in “Repairs” present feminine hygiene and common grooming to contain a number of brushing, washing, trimming, tucking, conditioning, shaving, plucking, and tying. It indicators itself by means of a fantastic many acquainted appurtenances like tweezers, razors, combs, brushes, toothbrushes, cleaning soap, sponges, scissors, needles, brooms, dustpans, rags, laundry and waste baskets, capsules, hair ties and scrunchies, nail polish, Band-Aids, pads, tampons, condoms, deodorant, containers of Kleenex, mirrors, and tubs of Vaseline. It has quite a bit to do with cleanliness, but additionally culturally-specific conventions and the interesting look of whole bodily management. Grooming conventions could also be coded or appear arbitrary, however can belie well being benefits, like dental hygiene correlating to longevity. Repairs is just not solely life- and culture-sustaining, it’s additionally only a primary a part of being an grownup on this planet, taking accountability for oneself and the issues we care about. And, involved as it’s with appearances, it has an inherent funding in aesthetics and the ornamental, making it an aptly self-referential topic for portray.

Each artists assemble their very own distinctive imagery, narrative sense, and technical facture to revolve round questions of management and a heightened consideration to element. Single errant strands of hair springing from an ideal bun, a size of looping floss on the tiled flooring, a used Q-tip dirty with yellow wax, individuated bubbles dispersed in a sudsy lather, completely shiny pink nails, the wavy directional cowlicks of cover charting the topography of muscle. Energetic care-taking, particularly when aimed on the self, requires paying consideration, noticing small issues that want attending to or fixing. Being extremely delicate. Wanting up shut. Such magnified focus manifests by means of shut cropping, excessive proximity, hyper mimesis, and enlarged scale in Miska’s horse work, or within the modest-but-ornate interiors full of tons of tiny, elaborate, titillating particulars that pull you into Buckwalter’s demur scenes and sometimes make me giggle.

Curiously, for each, the concepts that make repairs so compelling, from an aesthetic and labor viewpoint, are epitomized by braiding. The truth is, depictions of hair (quick or lengthy, horse or human) and its tidying up into braids represent their very own main subgroup of subject material shared by the artists, emblematic of nice care and delight taken in our bodies and their well-being. Miska’s Plaiting Needle (all works 2024) visualizes precision in picture and execution—meticulous, fastidious devotion to each horse and portray. Hair and conceal heat the core logic of her visible world, being the implicit if not express topic of practically each portray. Extra broadly, each artists have a fascination with texture and sample. And whereas Miska’s sensibility is tied to her love of Domenico Gnoli’s equally massive, intently cropped, and detailed research of material and hair, Buckwalter’s infatuation with flat ornamental sample emanates from her Pennsylvania Dutch upbringing and aesthetic immersion into that custom of interiors, furnishings, quilts, wallpaper, ceramics, and textiles. The variation, extent, and enthusiasm of Buckwalter’s floral and geometric patterns, crammed in edge-to-edge, throughout partitions and flooring, are entrancing and reinforce the people artwork and fairytale high quality of her weirdly flattened, shadow-less rooms. Every artist in her personal manner understands floor sample as defining house.

Whether or not by Miska’s cropping or Buckwalter’s strategic mirror reflections—or each artist’s affinity for our bodies seen from behind and largely occluded—there’s an avoidance of direct, frontal depictions of individuals. And by avoiding depictions of entire faces, there’s at all times a vital sense of significant withholding—a turning away and guarding of some privateness, concealing identities. Objects get minimize off abruptly or poke shyly in on the photos’ edges, making the body and border areas particularly charged and suspenseful. Each artists are so considerate and deliberate about framing, puncturing illusionism with reminders of the inherent abstractness of paint on floor. Knees or a little bit of pink material activate the perimeter and inside edges inside Buckwalter’s interiors; parallel bands of ornament at prime and backside make a body whereas additionally advancing narrative house; a toothbrush in a glass balances alongside the underside fringe of Drugs Cupboard, whereas half of Miska’s Trimming and Shoeing portray makes a cameo within the mirror reflection. (There are winking nods to Miska’s photos and Easter eggs tucked all through this group of Buckwalter’s work.)

No matter may lie past the body turns into implied presence, simply as the photographs largely describe human presence not directly by means of different issues. Their shared indirect relation to picturing residing topics is a key issue within the explicit sense of drama every artist builds into her photos. Miska’s photos have the excessive drama of black backdrops, lush cinematic close-ups, vivid readability, and theatrical spotlighting—behind the scenes of energy and historical past. Buckwalter’s have the stage drama of naturalistically composed set design: an oddly spare and excessively patterned home inside with selection particulars fastidiously positioned as telltale props and narrative clues. Hers is the drama of psychological house, intimate relations, unstated or whispered issues, and going to the lavatory. Collectively, theirs are the dramas of being drawn in and getting too shut, of permeating mild and the stuff of feminine fantasies that will get omitted of storybooks. – Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer



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