Exhibition Review: Lillian Michel
By: Lillian Michel
Art Historian and Writer, 2021
Anteroom faces approximately west. The window-front gallery is shaded by an awning and a pair of tall trees. In the morning, the work of Armin Mühsam and Debra M. Smith, two former residents of the Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency, is illuminated only by the cool, soft, natural light that indirectly reaches inside.
Before noon, the harshest shadows in the room are in Mühsam’s paintings. Prior to his 2017 residency in Corsicana, Mühsam painted landscapes. Searching for a new language of shape and color, he began an intensive exploration of collage that was translated in Texas to painting and, eventually, evolved into a new geometric vocabulary. The essence of collage is innate to Mühsam’s practice now. All his work originates in something found — the colors of print advertisements, the pattern inside a security envelope, the shapes of shadows. His recent paintings are based in realistic settings, but contain geometric shapes of varying colors, forms, and patterns that create optical illusions. First you assume they represent non-objective paintings and sculptures, then you realize some might be independent shapes imposed over the underlying composition, and finally you accept that really every element of the painting is fundamentally a shape defined by its relationship to all the other elements. He employs a similar strategy in his sculptures, assembling found objects — often pieces of discarded wood salvaged from construction sites — together in a way that transforms the disparate elements into a composition that is simultaneously abstract and evocative.
Smith has a painter’s sensitivity to shape and color, and a quilter’s intuition for balance and composition, although she can’t be defined as one or the other. Her works are pieced together from deconstructed vintage textiles, especially the translucent cream and acidic red linings of vintage kimono. Her collection of vintage fabrics, assembled over three decades, provides endless possibilities for combination. Smith's work is totally abstract, geometric, and linear, without obscuring its origins. If Mühsam’s work exercises the viewer’s sense of sight, Smith’s work activates their sense of touch. The slightly crooked lines, gentle wrinkles, tones subtly varied by wear and time, folds and seams, and inherent presence of the original weaver’s hand all give the work what Smith calls a “vibration” that resonates for a viewer. As a 2020 resident, Smith created a large-scale installation of dozens of colorful, graphically-patterned fabrics and segments of works in progress. The installation provided a sense of the intuitive process that Smith follows. Beginning from visually rich source materials, she searches for stimulating arrangements of color and pattern, building up, sewing, putting away, adjusting, and arriving at compositions that are balanced and refined.
Both based in Kansas City, Missouri, Mühsam and Smith both occupied 100 West’s third-floor studio. If those two coincidences were enough reason for this two-person exhibition — their first together — then their shared interests in geometric abstraction, found sources, and reconstruction are serendipitous revelations.
After noon, as the sun descends, sunlight penetrates the gallery. Dark gray shadows are cast by the window mullions, the door frame, the sculpture, the pedestal, the tree trunks, and the leaves, all shifting as sunset approaches. A person, their eyes tuned after viewing Mühsam’sand Smith’s works, might find a new appreciation for the lines, planes, and shapes appearing in the room, given temporary presence by light and shadow.