Conceptualist “ebook artist” Linda Ekstrom has lengthy been identified to have her personal private manner with books, to distinctive creative ends. A professor at UCSB’s Faculty of Artistic Research for greater than twenty years, Ekstrom is the topic of an interesting retrospective exhibition opening the brand new Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Artwork season, exploring her love of books — together with the Bible — and her love of deconstructing the bodily objects, fastidiously reshaping pages and minute strains of textual content. Deconstruction results in new and tangled meanings.
That latter a part of the method has fomented some controversy within the in depth Westmont present, known as Straddling Circumference, with some on the Christian faculty calling foul on the prospect of Ekstrom’s “desecration” of the Holy Bible. Ekstrom has proven her work in numerous artwork areas round city, and past, for a couple of a long time, however context issues in a Christian college setting. She stirred controversy over one work proven in a Westmont exhibition within the Nineties — “Sophia’s Logos,” additionally within the present present. However with this exhibition, the artwork and the artist stretch out within the full regalia and overview of a Biblical reviser, with mental and religious seeker credentials in test.
Kudos to the museum’s director and curator Judy Larson for facilitating this deserving retrospective tribute to an necessary and distinctive Santa Barbara–based mostly artist.
To play satan’s/angel’s advocate, Ekstrom’s “altered Bible” artwork may be considered from a really totally different perspective, as a part of a means of contemplation and a customized “re-secration” of the sacred ebook, from her personal vantage as a feminist, idea-fueled modern artist and in addition as a Catholic. Italian movie director Pier Paolo Pasolini bumped into related friction with the church, however his movies explored religious battle and inquiry from his viewpoint as a homosexual, Marxist Catholic. In latest a long time, religion-questioning artwork by Andres Serrano and Chris Ofili has rankled conservatives and engaged discourse on the altering function of the church.
For Ekstrom, the Bible is a residing, evolving fount of inspiration, not an inert textual content with fastened that means. Simply as Biblical students and seminarians parse potential meanings and revised references, her creative means concerned deciphering and reexamining the Bible, and exposing the patriarchal nature of the ebook and faith at massive.
That course of interprets into such actually Bible-based sculptures as “Flourish,” a meticulously cut-up flowering of pages bursting out from its leather-based cowl; or “Chains,” a protracted chain-like piece with every hyperlink constructed from a single Bible web page, invoking the continuum between heaven and Earth. “The Ladies of the Bible” is a deceptively sleek material piece, its lengthy, looping material embedded with all feminine references within the Bible, including as much as a surprisingly lean physique of textual content.
Ekstrom’s record of inspirations goes past the Bible, and a modest variety of items within the present spring from such non-religious influences as Emily Dickinson and feminine mystics Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, and Teresa of Ávila. The museum’s entrance gallery house consists of such extra-bookish items as “Labyrinth,” drawings each detailed and a contact chaotic; and “The Lengthy Stroll,” linear reminiscence drawings made along with her eyes closed to chronicle a stroll she as soon as took. They really feel like blueprints of circumambulation and the mysteries of reminiscence.
However our consideration is usually attuned to her “altered Bible” artwork, particularly given the prominence of that physique of labor, and as seen on this house on this campus. Past the subject material concerned, Ekstrom’s creative apply includes an ever-shifting array of creative approaches to sculptural kinds and change-ups. Her typically audacious — and for some, button-pushing — concepts are remodeled into craft-conscious and cleanly realized artwork objects.
“Mary and Eve II” depicts these major feminine figures within the Bible — Eve as a wayward however honest seeker of God, and Mary because the holy host who accepted God’s proposition, forwarding the grasp plan. The highly effective duo is represented, with a pinch of pithy wit, within the type of a canning jar with water (holy water, we presume), an apple, and a plastic Mary figurine.
In “Phrase of Hand,” Ekstrom’s super-fine dexterity is useful, having X-acto-knifed all Jesus’s phrases within the Bible (printed in purple in some editions), rolled into tiny balls, and stuffed in a clear glove. Voilà, a solution to grasp Jesus’s phrases in hand.
If many Biblical items are, the truth is, delicate and conceptual, the cloistered again nook of the principle gallery is extra startling: The flowery “Menstrual Liturgical Cycle” indicts the repressive, diminishing view of ladies within the Catholic church with neat rows of silk squares referring to the liturgical calendar, with a dab of pale blood on every. The piece makes an affect each dramatic and subversive, with a light-weight hand.
For these of us who’ve been maintaining tabs and admiring teasing glimpses of Ekstrom’s half over time, the sum impact of Straddling Circumference can quantity to a revelation. But the revelation isn’t a lot any artful shock impact, however a protracted arc appreciation of how her creative and, sure, religious obsessions match collectively in a grand design all her personal.
Straddling Circumference: The Artwork of Linda Ekstrom is on view at Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Artwork by way of November 11. See westmont.edu/ekstrom for particulars.
