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According to Sigmund Freud, one of the great sexist thinkers of the 20th century, the only contribution women have ever made to civilization in general and the arts in particular is--weaving. What may sound absurd today was influential in its day and age; in fact, Freud's theory of psychoanalysis continues to be influential long after his demise: would contemporary therapy culture be imaginable without his insistence that we look inward and dig deep? Would the pharmacological industry be able to pinpoint disorder after disorder, diagnosing deviations from normative behavior and reinforcing an imperative of well-adjusted propriety?

What's proper is so often in the eye of the beholder. Women rebelling against insane limitations imposed on their lives by the propriety-obsessed bourgeoisie in Freud's Vienna were conveniently thought to be afflicted with hysteria, a disease etymologically linked to Greek hystera, the womb. (When Dr. Rinner, my Latin teacher, sanctimoniously explained the connection between female anatomy and emotional instability to a class of 15-year olds at the Gymnasium I attended in Austria, echoing another one of Freud's famous dicta--"anatomy is destiny," all I could do was clumsily argue that he must be wrong, that surely, men were capable of hysterical behavior as well. An ill-fated attempt, since Dr. Rinner lost no time in turning my attempt at resistance into an exemplary hysterical outburst almost worthy of the clinical name.)

Ah, memories of growing up in a conservative town. Leaving the Twin Cities on one of the first appropriately (for the season) cold weekends this November, I visited Hudson, another, even smaller town, to take in the current exhibition at the Phipps, where six women--a sculptor, a photographer, a printmaker, a textile artist, a weaver, and a painter--delve into the complex meanings of home, place, memory, and transitions. Besides, they beautifully manage to prove dear Doctor Freud wrong by demonstrating that they are capable of doing more than "just" weaving--even though a few of them weave exceedingly well.

Upstairs, five established artists share the galleries, while downstairs, in gallery one, the youngest artist in the show, Melanie Van Houten, presents Threshold: fabric and rocks join cast iron sculptures of lace and crochet fabrics, displayed either hanging--on precariously fraying cotton ropes--or sitting on pedestals made from rock and iron, in a collection that asks us to suspend all idealized notions of feminine domesticity and delicacy. Doilies have never looked so potent before.

Melanie Van Houten, An Other Home  (detail)

Van Houten is an interesting artist: after earning her M.F.A. at the University of Minnesota, completing a residency at Franconia Sculpture Park in the summer of 2007, and teaching full-time at St. Kate's in the sculpture program, she has recently relocated to Kentucky, where she is planning to build a sculpture park--the Josephine Sculpture Park--on the land that used to be her grandparents' tobacco farm. This return is relevant for Van Houten's work, since conceptually her artistic practice revolves around the concept of home: the longing, nostalgic and otherwise, to return, the push and pull between the desires for independence and the familiar sense of belonging to a place without question. But Van Houten's work also addresses the equally fascinating process of making a home, consciously, intentionally--as we are forced to do, sooner or later, with more or less distance to cover between our geographic origins and wherever life takes us.

Let's picture Freud and his famous couch here for a moment: the home and the womb, domesticity and the doily--it all seems to fall into place. A wise nod, a puff on the pipe.

But not so fast:

Van Houten's sculpture, Reclamation, at Franconia Sculpture Park consists of a tall, iron skeleton of a house--a rusty frame of a home that has eroded away to its barest structural components. It's a vestige of home, really, no dwelling place that could ever offer any real shelter. Cast in iron, it offers a compelling commentary on how hard it is to let go of a home; long after we have physically left, that elemental idea--perhaps the illusion--of belonging keeps haunting us. An old cabin, its boards bleached and stained from long-time exposure to the elements, hangs suspended from the iron bars: another old, traditional image of home, a frontier dwelling even, sways on cotton ropes. The cabin is hollow, its insides filled with a web of cotton rope: a spider web, woven to catch prey, and to entangle us in memories and dreams of place, home, and belonging?

Installation of Reclamation at Franconia Sculpture Park in the summer of 2007

The materials Van Houten relies on are deceptively simple--iron, wood, rope; the effect is striking. There is no sentimental nostalgia for domestic bliss here but a powerful reckoning with the ruins of home, the suspension of belonging, and precarious insistence that even amongst the eroded remains of an old idea, a new home can be found or built or made--reclaimed, even.

Melanie Van Houten, An Other Home.

In An Other Home, Van Houten uses a mundane object, a chair, and casts it in iron. The idea of home as a place to be sedentary manifests itself quite literally. But this simple chair as token of home is "other:" no longer self evident and unquestioned, but both rigid and reliable, it is snagged and snared by cotton ropes that, once more, form a spider-web-like contraption, showing, in no uncertain terms, the ways we are caught up, as if inevitably, in the twisted strands connecting us to the place we called home first. (In one installation, the shape of cotton rope web forms a house-like shape... a freakish, disintegrating fray of a house, reaching out to the chair, clinging to it, not letting go). In Who Says What We Call Home, on view at the Phipps (but shown below in an earlier version at Franconia), the rusted façade of a house is similarly entangled in a web of cotton rope: propped up, tent-like, and unable to break free of all the strings attached, quite literally, to the idea of home.

Melanie Van Houten, Who Says What We Call Home?

 
Van Houten's materials in Threshold, the collective title of the body of work on view at the Phipps until January 4 have expanded: in addition to the cotton rope, cast iron, and wood (reclaimed doors, this time), rocks, fabrics, wallpaper, and copper conspire to return, once more, to the compelling idea of home.

In Mine, three slabs of rock lean on top of a narrow, wall-mounted shelf. The rocks are identified by place: Faribault, MN, Coalbrookdale, UK (home of the Ironbridge Museum of Steel Sculpture), and St. Cloud, MN. Making a home, here, means connecting with the land at its most foundational: its very bedrock. Claiming ownership of these small pieces of the land is a proprietorial gesture, and yet, seems oddly futile: our ephemeral desire for home--having one, making one--pales in comparison to the sheer age, compression, erosion, these rocks have been through. These rocks may well survive us all.

Rocks, too, play a role, albeit a supporting one, in Thrown Stones I-IX: slabs of slate sit on three-legged iron stools and support small cast iron sculptures of house-like shapes. Van Houten made the molds for these casts from reclaimed crochet and lace fabrics, teasing them into rudimentary house-like structures. Yet these structures seem to flow and bleed over the rock, in a state of decomposition, caught and immortalized in iron. They are partial, fragmentary, incomplete--and utterly compelling in the way they remind of fragile, ethereal lace yet are made of iron and sit on rock. Once again, the desire for feeling grounded in a home collides with the transitory, the domestically delicate with the rawness of the materials. 

In the middle of gallery one, on the floor, more houses promise the specter of home: made from quilted and felted fabric, and wallpaper, respectively, these pseudo-dollhouses have no windows or doors. Thus the cozy if impermanent comfort they suggest takes on the sinister edge of a padded cell that, thankfully, we get to see from the outside.

Does the home pose a threat or tempt with the promise of a happy-ever-after?

This question has haunted literature about artists for centuries. Can great art coexist with the pleasures of an ordinary domestic life, or do we need tortured and half-starved geniuses to produce work that catapults audiences out of complacent equanimity? But while cliché insists that all artists have to grapple with this question, artists who happen to be women have met with considerably more resistance to make these choices. (Well, maybe not while they were pleasantly weaving away in clean and proper bourgeois salons.)

In Before the Dawn, Van Houten's cast iron house sculptures play both parts, threat and promise: while some lead-colored house-shaped sculptures anchor cotton ropes to the floor, promising stability and grounding, the suspended houses, made of cast iron molded from crochet and lace, threaten to fall, the cotton ropes that hold them in place visibly unraveling. As in the Thrown series, these houses/homes seem on verge of disintegrating, caught at the very moment just prior to a sublime unraveling--but solidifying this moment with metallic certainty.

The title of the piece situates Before the Dawn at a liminal moment--the break of day, Jan Fabre's blue hour, the brief time span between night and day. Similarly, a "threshold" is located in between the domestic sphere and the outside world; it is a space of transition, where boundaries meet, and possibilities are born. Things are poised to happen--but we don't know yet what they are. What we do know is that here we see the moment right before this unraveling. That is the threshold this body of work seems to inhabit.

Leaving Van Houten's work for the upstairs galleries, I take a step back in time, it seems: here are women who weave, at last--or, as Dr. Freud and Dr. Rinner might agree, still!

One of Marie Westerman's TEXTiles

in TEXTiles, Marie Westerman presents double and triple woven fabrics that thrive in the space between textile and text, a kind of visual storytelling that draws on symbols from the natural world. Particularly noteworthy: the narrow, tall panels of "Two Birches" flank "Incantation," a larger tapestry where speckled tree trunks grow into a cross-arched ceiling of sorts, topped by the phases of the moon and what looks like Celtic runes. Imagery and triptych display capture the convergence between nature and religiously inspired architecture. The work is very proper, well crafted, well intentioned, and entirely conventional. 

Tressa Sularz similarly relies on a traditional craft: basket weaving. Unlike her widely featured baskets (look for them online in Home and Garden, Wickerwoman, Round Hearth, and, in Minneapolis, at the Textile Center), the objects on display at the Phipps refute the plain demands of utility in order to become fine art: Tulipe and Closures, woven from ratan with shell buttons attached, serves no purpose but, according to the artist, "reflects movement and transition" and "emulates... the emotional terrain I continue to navigate." Lofty sentiments aside, the divide between art and craft--in terms of prestige and purpose--has been bridged more effectively elsewhere. (May I remind of the amazing "Functional Sculpture" show Glenn Gordon co-curated at Carlton College last winter?)

Tressa Sularz, Tulipe and Closures

Apart from such literally woven materials, photographer Karen Klein and painter/collagist Teita Amberg both invoke the figurative threads woven together in their respective bodies of work: Amberg's identifies "the thread that ties this collection together" as her "having a great deal of fun" (I quote from the artist's statement)-an approach that, despite the entertainment it doubtlessly grants the artist, falls flat conceptually. Klein, on the other hand, articulates the "connective thread" of "In Focus, Out of Memory," with more nuance, weaving together the memory of pivotal events in what she calls "a visual diary of sorts." Yet the digital photo-collages are no solipsistic exercise in self-absorption. Most of them invite reflection and allow viewers the freedom to connect to the imagery on their own terms, relying on their own memories and associations rather than getting caught up in deciphering the artist's.

Karen Klein, a digital collage included in "In Focus, Out of Memory"

In contrast, Mary Barrett's wood cut prints turned collages look outward and eschew the digital altogether: In her Canyon series, prints are cut and carved into, the paper ruffled or layered into three-dimensional textures. The landscapes Barrett thus creates look alive with movement. The sheer verticality of the canyon walls cuts into distant pockets of visible sky, while the horizontal breadth of Bryce canyon sprawls over the paper in so many ochre patterns. The broad-shouldered peaks of Glacier National Park reverberate with the slow grinding of glacial ice, its movement echoed in the white traces left by Barrett's expert cuts. Rather than weaving or adding elements together in order to make meaning, Barrett cuts to make meaning. (The action of cutting itself cannot but signify, especially in a Freudian universe. Interestingly, the root of "castration" leads back to the cutting up of land, severing parcels for military uses and turning them into forts, Latin castrum).

From the great outdoors, cut, printed, and collaged in Barrett's "Canyon Series and other 'Scapes," I am transported back to the here and now abruptly, when an older woman asks me, without prelude: "Do you know how fortunate you are to be born"--she hesitates, politely and so adorably Midwestern--"well, when and where you were born?"

Needless to say, I invite further explanation: It was in a small town in rural Michigan in the late 1960s, she tells me, when she and her girlfriend who had just returned from a trip to London sported brand new tattoo hose. Barely skirting expulsion, they were told to go home, change, and never ever wear those terrible tights again. Apparently, girls' legs were scary enough without an added thin layer of patterned nylon. Propriety was enforced and adolescent women's bodies policed.  But here, years later, my hummingbird-flower-paisley tights briefly allowed us to bridge cultures and generations, and share this story, far from home. And suddenly, the present does not look so bleak. Occasionally, it is a good thing that what we thought we knew and took for granted unravels in front of our very eyes.