SUSAN MASTRANGELO: THIS IS NOT ROPE
Curated by Lisa Schilling
September 12 - October 26, 2024
Opening Reception: September 12, 6-8 pm
Field Projects is pleased to announce This Is Not Rope a solo show of paintings by artist Susan Mastrangelo. Curated by Lisa Schilling, the show is on view at 526 West 26th Street suite 807 (8th Fir) from September 12 - October 19.
Mastrangelo's mixed media paintings made of upholstery cord, fabric, paper, ink, yam, and paint on panel or canvas bely their seemingly loose meanders and arabesques with innate and unavoidable tensions:
between the figure and the body, between the picture plane and it's edges, between knowing and not knowing, between holding it together and falling apart.
Mastrangelo begins each work on the floor where she draws on a panel or canvas with cord.
After she is satisfied with the shapes and paths she has laid, the cords are secured with glue and the piece is moved from the floor to the wall. Once vertical the drawing becomes a substrate for other processes and explorations. Sometimes painting, sometimes scraping, sometimes covering, sometimes cutting and applying fabric or paper - or even pieces of her own monoprints. Immediacy is what keeps the work present for Mastrangelo, who studied with Philip Guston at Boston University. "The more chances you take within a certain framework, the better off you are," Mastrangelo says. "It's all about trusting yourself - that's what Guston pounded into everyone's head." Finally, the entire work is secured with a stretch of knitting that reaches and spreads and appears to keep it all in place like an expanse of netting or fascia. The titles of the works are emotional for Mastrangelo and come directly from strong feelings and responses to observed situations and lived experiences. The title of the show was taken from the poem of the
same name by writer and producer Mac Barrett.
Gallery hours: Thur-Sat 12-6 or by appointment. info@fieldprojectsgallery.com
This is Not Rope
after a visit to Susan Mastrangelo's studio
Something captured, netted-a feeling, animated.
She has big ones, and small, clustered beside the studio door as if expecting an outing.
She can't believe she works with these damn things, she says, as they struggle free from their damn thingness in the frame before me, as if I'd caught the art in the act of becoming itself— a feeling entangled in its own expression-who among us hasn't been there?
That we were walking contradictions, studies in contrast, even when in all black, was the or at least an unupholstered truth on display, written, as it were, in upholstery, having she says thank god nothing to do with politics what could possibly be political about these irreconcilable textures, reconciled,
made to speak in one pink and violet voice?
This is what I'm doing now, she says, alluding to a past of other means, and future. And by this you mean?
She leaves me alone with the answer— it inarticulates itself:
undrooping, unstraightenable— a difference of opinion
between the curve and the line about which neither party is losing its cool, a friendly cacophony of textures, though this poem has already used the word "textures;" speaking of recycled materials, she gets hers upstate in nearly illicit handoffs by the side of the road, bags of unknown origins bloated with cord and fabrics torn from unknown lives, rescued from nothing, blessed with meaning.
Look at it:
Something is emerging, the art climbing out of itself, tearing its fishnets
on the edges of our reality.
She explains the process: begin with a pandemic, add a preponderance of yarn, i.e. time,
and knit nervously through it, calming nerves with other nerves in the factory of her fingers, a rapid hand-held industry producing what she will need for what she is doing now,
and also an infinite scarf for a finite man about whom she feels infinitely, and who, like everyone else-
including you, i.e. me, i.e. any human form-is not depicted here, or there, not anywhere, unless
— Mac Barrett
Mac Barrett is a poet and producer who lives in Brooklyn