BURCHFIELD PENNEY: EXHIBITION CATALOGUE:
ESSAY BY TIFFANY G. GAINES
Remember Me
Burchfield Penney Art Center- Exhibition Catalogue
May 2024
Remember Me
Essay by Tiffany D Gaines
Memories, like identities, are hardly ever linear and absolute. Rather, they are nuanced, imperfect, and layered. We experience a myriad of personal and social influences that help shape and reshape our identities over time. The accumulation of these impressions lingers as our understanding of ourselves and how we relate to the world around us evolves.
Multidisciplinary artist Patricia Schnall Gutierrez considers how disjointed memories inform identity and broader perceptions of femininity. Receiving her BFA from SUNY Buffalo in 1978, the development of her practice coincided with second-wave feminism, challenging societal limitations on the roles of women. She utilizes drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, film, collage, and performance to address these limitations while infusing her own narratives as a woman, artist, mother, and wife.
Much of her work mines histories, acknowledging how the past informs the present to create what she considers "a contemporary chronicle of life interwoven with memories of joy, sorrow, growth, and introspection." Fragmentation is a continuous theme of her process, which ponders the relationship between material, form, and outcome.
The mixed media installation Fragmented Memories (2024) contains an old desk surrounded by collage panels. Several collages include black-and-white images reminiscent of 1950s Americana, and the quintessential mid-century woman who is fulfilled by homemaking and motherhood. Schnall Gutierrez references domestic chores throughout her work to interrogate the underlying strain of these traditional roles and the experiences they entail. Erased in the Wash (2013) combines a sprawling 200-foot washing machine hose with audio of water, and whispers inviting the viewer to "come closer." Inspired by a woman's tragic abusive experience behind closed doors, the installation bears the weight of such unspoken moments despite attempts for them to be washed away and forgotten.
There is a similar unsettledness to Sleepwalk (2013), a projection on folded white sheets that illustrates the "restless dream of a midlife housewife." As the subject's legs wrestle in bed, she is unable to find comfort, peace, and stillness where she is. Turning inward, the photographic series Self Portraits with Polka Dots (2012) depicts the artist wrapped in a white sheet at the impasse between two doorways. The work signals tension between her roles as a wife and mother and as an artist. Losing herself under the pressure of fulfilling both external duties and internal passions, she is absent in the last image, and solely the sheets remain.
The inclusion of fabrics, such as the sheets in Sleepwalk and Self Portraits, is a recurring motif that nods to the history of textiles as an integral part of traditional women's labor.
A Life of Dress Up (2024) includes a disassembled female mannequin adorned in a dress with a collection of tattered shoes surrounding the base, and makeup dripping down her face. An assemblage of worn and torn clothes hangs behind. The work emphasizes clothing as a site of memory that marks changing perceptions of womanhood over time.
Schnall Gutierrez's practice recognizes and moves fluidly beyond imposed constructions of femininity. Her series of charcoal drawings are gestural abstractions that visualize female forms with no constraints. The ongoing Package Project activates viewers as participants in this meditative space as they contribute anonymous recollections of home and domestic labor. As the notes are packaged and collected, the vastness of individual and collective memories accumulates. Whether assumed and imposed roles of feminine identity are critiqued or embraced, fostering dialogue that allows for a multitude of voices to be affirmed is vital. Power lies in asserting space for women to define and honor the unique experiences that shape their lives on their terms. As contemporary threats to women's autonomy continue to loom, such conversations remind us of the progress made towards equity and what is at stake, making them more necessary than ever.
Tiffany D. Gaines
Associate Curator