The Net Effect

Netting the Wind consists of a focused study of fishing nets in lightly hued admixtures of red, yellow, and blue. Looking on the artist’s website through archives of her work in collections at the Tacoma Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, we see how significantly Netting the Wind marks yet another transition in the artist’s oeuvre spanning four decades.

Older works present dark palettes, forming shapes that occlude one another. For example, an experimental work, Bank Statement (1984) now in the Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, features lithographs printed in dark black and red inks onto backsides of actual returned checks. The work juxtaposes images of human (mostly female) bodies, as disembodied hands with words and numbers give impressions of struggle and financial adversity. 

Seven years later, in the intaglio print work Dozen Red Roses Set #1 (1991), we find copious black ink, blurred lines, and two tangled bodies examine one another, a fist grappling with a handful of what appear to be flower stems, but feel haunted by darkly smudged forms in the lower left of the composition.

While Sheier has worked with other and lighter palettes, compositions, and media throughout the ensuing thirty years; there is little indication that we would find her where she is today-working with such simplicity in color and form, and so very much emptiness.

As tends be true of women artists, Scheier is emotionally generous with her audience. This is helpful, as abstract studies of form are sometimes difficult to decipher or read for affective content. Fortunately the talk, given on March 18th, provided the artist with an opportunity to embody her artwork and express the somatic element of her practice. 

Sheier shared her personal story, one of growing up in a Catholic family of many children, and of becoming estranged from her father upon announcing her own vocation as artist. She told us the story of her career, of difficulties faced by women in the ’80’s and ’90’s who weren’t necessarily enamoured with either abstract expressionism or pop art. 

Her decision to go into print making provided an escape from that climate, as print-making offers aesthetic alternatives to abstraction or pop. Working with materials such as steel, stone, and paper, using ink and paint with various manual, semi-automatic, and fully automated machines, all of this brings the hand of the artist into unique contact with both medium and world.

An early highpoint in Scheier’s talk at i.e. was her spirited exclamation that, “I discovered that…Oh! I can tell my own story, in my work!” In today’s world of art activism and identity politics, this may seem like a no-brainer, but in the 1980’s American art world, as cultural industries began to tighten their hold upon a post-Abstract art market, one’s own story was the first thing your professor didn’t want you to get ‘hung-up on.’

Abstract and disembodied truths about existence, on the other hand, were keys to the kingdom. In other words, the experience of being in a human body, much less a woman’s body, was relatively off the table.

Throughout the talk, we learned the extent to which Sheier’s work is influenced by her spirituality as embodied experience. In a one-sheet handed out at the exhibition, Sheier writes, “Spiritual quest is the focus of Netting the Wind,” and also, “There is so much going on, crumbling nurse logs, water splashing over the rocks, earthy smells, bird calls, the endless shades of green, the tide slinging up the beach and receding back into the vast sea body. I carry this somatic experience back to the studio.”

Curator Margy Lavelle opened the artist’s talk by drawing our attention to the murmuration of snowbirds just outside the gallery. Indeed this migration is something Washington State Skagit Valley is well-known for. It is a spectacular sound as well as sight, with thousands of swarming, circling, and crying birds preparing to move further north.

Lavelle’s segue helped us embody ourselves in the present, drawing analogy to the motion and energy of Scheier’s paintings around us. The Net Effect of this curatorial approach is one of integration; integration of abstraction and figuration, wind and water, print-making and painting, as well as body and spirit.

[1] Shirley Sheier’s website: www.shirleyscheierstudio.com