Michele Oka Doner

Michele Oka Doner Strategic Misbehavior Michele Oka Doner Contents Introduction Ai Kato 7 Strategic Misbehavior Deborah Rothschild 9 Artwork Michele Oka Doner 23 Biography 56 Exhibition Checklist 57 Introduction Tower 49 Gallery is honored to present a provocative installation by Michele Oka Doner. Strategic Misbehavior converts Tower 49’s corporate environment into a theatrical stage set with fantastical elements inspired by the natural world. I was first introduced to the work of Michele Oka Doner at a private sale exhibition, The Shaman’s Hut, at Christie’s in November of 2015. I was taken with the fine delicacy and elegance Michele consistently mastered throughout five decades of work. My second encounter with Michele’s work was A Walk on the Beach, a site- specific art installation at the Miami International Airport, consisting of cast bronzes including seaweed, shells, stems, and assorted aquatic forms. Michele transformed a busy commuter atmosphere into a walk along the shores of Miami. Glancing at the ground, travelers were mesmerized to discover ethereal, golden, natural motifs guiding them through the airport. Michele expertly imbues urban and cold settings with a serene and whimsical ambience, calming viewers and striking intrigue with art in unlikely spaces. I was eager for Michele to grace Tower 49 Gallery with the feeling of discovering nature in a concrete jungle. Tower 49 Gallery is an art exhibition space, but also serves as a public access way and lobby space for Tower 49 offices and tenants. I anticipate that all who enter Tower 49 will explore and engage Michele’s mythical, mystical creatures, reliefs,and photographs–all inspired by the natural world. This is the first exhibition at Tower 49 Gallery focusing on a theatrical exhibition, in which sculptures on the ground floor interact with people passing through the lobbies. The sky lobby features Michele’s collection of photographs, Into the Mysterium. These photographs blur the borders between walls, creating an unexpected aquatic experience. The curator and catalogue author for this exhibition is Deborah Rothschild, former Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Williams College Museum of Art. Strategic Misbehavior was made possible by the efforts of Michele Oka Doner, Deborah Rothschild, Frederick Doner, Sebastian Sarmiento, Aaron Yassin, and Guy Reziciner. Ai Kato Exhibition Director of Tower 49 Gallery Strategic Misbehavior Deborah Rothschild Throughout her professional life Michele Oka Doner has been acting up. From her elegant and gracious bearing one would not guess that she is a troublemaker. But she has been subverting long-held ideas about art making for over five decades. With a light touch and understated finesse, she consistently pushes against convention and blurs boundaries, ranging from the appropriate gender for an artist to acceptable materials, installation techniques, sources of inspiration, location sites, and subject matter. She consistently expands our point of view so that we are carried to the shoreline or underwater as we walk on a shimmering simulacrum of the beach and ocean floor, or we are transported far below ground to look up at tree roots metamorphosed into a giant chandelier.1 She is able to imagine a six-inch piece of bark and a section of root (fig. 1) transformed to a fifty-foot concrete monument with embedded hydrating systems (fig. 2), making this impossible vision a reality by learning and applying advanced aspects of digital technology, structural engineering and architectural construction. With the installation at Tower 49, this Miami born, New York based artist, recasts an office building’s corporate entrance lobby and 24th floor gallery into a theatrical mise en scene for experiencing and contemplating primal mysteries. The entrance lobby of Tower 49 is an imposing twenty-foot high interior with granite perimeter walls and dramatically veined red marble interior walls (opposite page). It is a tower of monolithic proportions where swarms of workers come and go absorbed by their mobile devices and distracted by professional or personal matters. The building’s lobby was not initially created for staging art, but primarily as means to transition people from the street to workplace as efficiently as possible. Oka Doner challenges this 9 function by provoking interaction with and breathing life into the formidable Tower 49 space. The “Roman” scale and the assertive marble walls are difficult to work with. Rather than fight them, Oka Doner disarms the situation by introducing unexpected, out of place elements: disconcerting humanoid sculptures of bronze; a wall of strange hanging wax life forms; and three large works on paper, printed directly from roots, twigs, branches, and other organic material. A further unexpected intervention is the addition of living elements–green palm fronds that are placed at the base of the three large-scale sculptures (p. 8, 38). When visitors enter through the north doorway, they are confronted by “giant figures from another realm evoking primal feelings with their feral bodies”2 that appear to have risen from the primordial mud. Mana (2015), the largest at seventy inches high, is a fossilized half-tree/half man (is he wearing loafers?) (p. 25) It is cast in bronze largely from the roots, bark branches and organic detritus that Oka Doner gathers on her legendary foraging expeditions through south Florida, or wherever she finds herself (fig. 3). The figure looms before us charred, flayed and disemboweled, but powerfully erect and somehow casually confident. One element cast from wood protrudes at groin level confirming the figure’s Zeus-like virility. Michele Oka Doner is a voracious reader interested in world mythologies, arcane cosmologies, and ancient texts. She names her pieces according to their origins and the titles are an integral part of her work. For example, the word “mana” refers to a supernatural power concentrated in an object or person. It is a term at the source of many Pacific languages and is believed to have originated from overpowering natural forces such as gale winds, thunder and lightning that early Pacific peoples could not explain. Mana’s comrade, Purana (2015) (p. 24), stands upright on small, blackened feet and relatively short legs. His gnarled form supports a large torso and shoulders. Deciduous tree trunks and/or root systems as well as twisting vines seem to have been enlisted in his fabrication. Purana refers to a class of ancient Sanskrit texts that detail the history of the universe from creation to destruction. Like Mana, this effigy seems to have survived destructive forces. These two male figures flank Primal Self Portrait (2008) (p. 23), a well-proportioned human scale female that mirrors Oka Doner’s frame. The red iron oxide that has been pushed into the crevices of her cast bronze body “evokes blood, a life-giving fluid,”3 and brings 10 Fig. 1 Root-and bark study for Micco, painted white for scanning. Approximately 6 in. long, 2012. Fig. 2 Micco, Concrete Pavilion, Doral City Hall Park. Concrete formulated with small stone aggregate, 25 × 50 × 35 feet. Commissioned by Codina Partners. Installed 2013. 11 to mind both torture and menstruation. Although, like the two males, she is headless and armless, she differs from them in form, color, and texture: instead of dark brown/black her surface is gold and red. She too appears flayed, but her “skin” is not formed from discernable roots, vines or bark. Instead, the vertical striations that mark her were created by hand as Oka Doner attempted to simultaneously “carve the body up and relate it to geological and other forces of nature.”4 Comparisons abound to African ritual objects, to tortured Renaissance figures such as Donatello’s Penitent Magdalene, or to contemporary works like Kiki Smith’s raw and textured bronze Virgin Mary. In the narrow entry space of the lobby, the three figures stand like forbidding archaic divinities, palm frond offerings at their feet. Adjacent to this group is a concierge desk, which is transformed into a dais for Primal Self Portrait’s smaller and more amorphous cousin, First Radiant Figure (2008) (p. 31). Recalling the dripped sand structures children often make at the beach, this humanoid of indeterminate gender seems at once to be rising from and melting into its base. The feet of the craggy creature are large, froglike appendages that merge into its tall base. Although lower on the evolutionary ladder, First Radiant Figure is linked to Primal Self Portrait by virtue of similar patinas and striated bodies. Birth of Adam (2007) (p. 26) dominates the east wall and “references the community from where all these giants dwell. It is the beginning.”5 With this powerful eight-foot relief print, Oka Doner further unsettles the dominion of Tower 49’s monolithic lobby and shakes up its business-as-usual comings and goings. Charged particles seem to radiate from the nude figure making it look as though Adam, the first man, is coming into existence and solidifying before our eyes. The artist has accomplished a remarkable feat by conferring movement and energy onto a static, two-dimensional image. Adamah means “earth,” and according to the Old Testament, Adam was formed from “the dust of the ground;” (Genesis 2:7). Oka Doner fittingly yet iconoclastically creates her Adam from foraged bio-debris found on the ground. The twigs, dirt, branches, and leaves that form the figure are considered lowly materials generally not thought of as suitable for high art. There is an element of mischief too in drawing attention to Adam’s generative organ– the dark focal point of the image, which one would like to think was printed from a fig leaf. 12 Fig. 3 Michele Oka Doner gathering materials in Miami, 2002. 13 Next to the Birth of Adam on the far wall, the delicate relief print Lungs seems to respire (2007) (p.

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