Curated by David Cohen
Essays by Eric Gelber

Curatorial Statement

CHRIS DUNCAN
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GEOFFREY HEYWORTH
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KARLIS REKEVICS
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SALLY TITTMANN
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Visitor Information

About the Studio School

About the Gallery Program

Sally Tittmann

Sally Tittmann Innatus Amor (2001)
wood, 24 x 21 x 22 inches

Sally Tittmann’s first experiences making sculpture included close study of the human figure. She made figurative sculpture for two years while studying at Yale, prior to her period at the New York Studio School from 1988-1990. At the Studio School she studied with sculptor Garth Evans, who was a positive influence, she says. “Although he taught me a lot about basic plastic relationships - form, color, proportion, etc. - he was also able to teach me about the relationship between the artist and the art, and between the viewer and the art. He was very good about addressing the emotional and psychological aspects of creating art and looking at it. He also managed - and this is not easy for an art teacher - to discourage any imitation of his own work.”

At the Studio School, Tittmann sculpted busts and full figures from the live model and experimented with assemblage and installation art. She did a series of sculptures using books or based on the book format. “School,” an installation of a number of books standing vertically on the gallery floor with their pages spread open, could be a metaphor for a school of fish or students in a classroom. The covers of the books are painted a uniform white so that the slivers of color and rhythmic rows of black specks visible within the fanned out pages become the focus of our attention. This cleverly reverses the sad state of literature in our culture. The inside of the book is what catches and holds our attention, not the contrived imagery on the front covers and the hyperbolic blurbs on the back covers. This installation included Tittmann’s first use of smaller and similar units to build a complex structure that contains layers of meaning.

After Tittmann left the Studio School she made sculptures out of wood for approximately ten years. Initially she built boxes with peaked roofs and other box-like structures with single drawers that were skewed in some way. She restricted her materials to cheap pine one-by-fours. She considers this her conceptual period because she knew what she wanted to build, more or less, before starting to build it.

“Anne” from 1992 is a box with a drawer extending from it like a tongue or mouth. Tittmann says the work was inspired by the betrayal of the late poet Anne Sexton by her psychologist, who publicly released notes taken during therapy sessions. The odd experience of seeing only one drawer protruding from a large box shape is disquieting because drawers have a safe and practical purpose in our daily lives and Tittmann’s use of the drawer undermines this sense of comfort, which is the product of years of routine. The inside of the drawer is not where our socks are but is transformed into the dark recesses of a troubled psyche. With one simple gesture, Sexton’s private thoughts are exposed to the light of public scrutiny. The process can’t be reversed; the drawer in “Anne” is too long to fit back into the box and can’t be shut.

Tittmann eventually started to use small pieces of found wood. She hammered them together to build up chimney-like vertical forms. This cumulative procedure is dramatized by the precarious tilt and angle of some of these sculptures. She began to allow the process itself to lead her to a final form and not some preconceived idea. She would dismantle and rebuild a sculpture if she was not happy with the shape, proportions, or dimensions. The individual pieces of wood have unique stains, knots and holes, handwriting, logos, and coloration, and are used to good effect. Tittmann carefully places the different pieces so that the relatively flat sides of some of these wood sculptures have complex painterly surfaces. The histories of the individual components become part of the narrative of the sculpture. The multiple layers of wood, the irregular lines produced by them on the exterior of the sculpture, formally disrupt the overarching structure. Even though the individual pieces of wood are tiny and it is hard to make out where an individual piece begins and ends, there is an element of de-differentiation present in the sense that the main form is repressed in some way. Instead of seeing a whole we see multiple layers.

Sally Tittmann Be Mine (2004)
papier mache and encaustic, 10 x 11-1/2 x 11"

After growing tired of verticality and straight-edged rectilinear forms, Tittmann began to build horizontally-oriented wood sculptures that spread across the floor. She calls them “endless loops” because they are made by connecting one piece of wood to another in a chain-like fashion. She limited herself to this technique and the use of right angles only. Unlike the vertically-oriented wood pieces that have sealed-off interiors, the intertwining straight lines and right angles that make up these horizontally-oriented sculptures create intricate, compact spaces within their rambling but stubbornly logical designs. These sculptures can be reduced to a straight line if they are stretched from end to end. The sculptures register as miniaturized landscapes or futuristic cityscapes. Our eyes travel through them and around them and our gaze is caught in the intuitive network of three dimensional lines. Although there seems to be a mathematical principle behind these designs, they are in fact completely intuitive.

A few years ago, Tittmann began using newspaper, papier-mâché, paper pulp, and encaustic. She wanted to explore more “feminine” and “curvaceous” shapes and to revisit some of the modelled forms from her years working from the figure. Tittmann uses different sized balloons to support the layers of material she builds up around them, popping and removing the balloons when the shell is strong enough. She manipulates these paper orbs by stapling them, sometimes adding a layer of burlap and plaster and encaustic. These paper sculptures are built in a simple, time-consuming and methodical fashion. The encaustic and paper pulp create wonderful uneven textures that, along with applied colors, leave the viewer guessing as to what the sculptures are made of. Without actually touching them we have no idea if they are hard or soft.

A large, tumescent, bright red orb from 2004 titled “Be Mine”, conjures up images of candy products and body parts. The artificial electric orange-red coloration plays nicely off the organic shape of the orb. We think of beads, breasts, testicles, Red Hots, Jawbreakers, skeletal fragments, blood corpuscles, counters from an abacus. The angle-free orb allows Tittmann to explore the complex ambiguities of matter. From planets to molecules the circular orb is fundamental to all manifestations of energy and life.

Recently Tittmann has been working with rows of orb-like forms. These extend from the floor to the ceiling and appear to be free standing (the main support is hidden within the sculpture). The repetition of form and the fact that the individual units she is using to build the larger structure are big and distinct enough to be scrutinized easily, allows her to explore contradictory formal qualities through serialization. The fact that these orbs are literally connected forces them to be part of the same gestalt, but the repetition of individual units undermines the viewer’s urge to synthesize the parts into some greater whole. Unlike the isolated sculptural object, which turns in on itself or only interacts with the space immediately surrounding it, these sculptures interact with the entire room in which they are exhibited. They are also metaphors for micro and macro forms of organic life and a weird sort of utopian architecture: imagine if the rectangular brick was replaced by breast-like blobs. Tittmann takes an intellectual approach to object making in the sense that she limits her working methods and materials in order to challenge her imagination.

Eric Gelber