Art in America Designing Women

For a new suite of paintings executed in encaustic and resin, Cheryl Goldslegerfound inspiration in the often unheralded work of women architects.

BY JERRY CULL JM

heryl Goldsleger's recent shallowly modeled stairways C exhibition at Atlanta's and other elements in a Museum of Contemporary Art translucent resin that har• of Georgia (MOCA GA) was monizes exquisitely with the titled "Utopia." Though the bas-relief of the more tradi• name refers to the ideal com• tional pigmented wax. The munities projected by some of work based on Hicks's 1878 the women architects whom design for a workman's cot• she celebrates, it might be an tage, for example, renders appropriate title for Gold• the rather romanticized pro• sleger's own work. As is well ject as a grid of nine straight- known, the word derives from on front elevations laid over the Greek for "no place," and a single large perspectival Goldsleger's drawings and rendering. It takes a long paintings have always depict• moment to realize that the ed sites or spaces that are at entryways of the cramped once logically compelling and structures are recessed into physically impossible. the wood panel and each fur• Two decades ago, she first nished with its own doll- won recognition for renderings house steps. The outcome of vertiginous architecture, is encaustic painting deli• structures overlaid with dia• cately transmuted into grammatic crisscrossing lines sculpture. But Goldsleger that seem intended to clarify remains firmly anchored the relationships among the in the basic rectangular parts but, paradoxically, serve panel; her forays into the to complicate and obscure third dimension come as them. This was succeeded by a Intersection, 2001, wax, oil, pigment, wood, resin, 41 by 41 by 2 inches. elegant interruptions of an purer geometry of concentric otherwise two-dimensional circles and interlocking rectan• pictorial conception. gles, once again visually logi• cal but more reminiscent of the labyrinth "utopia" are based on blueprints and render• he sweetness of miniaturization in Daedalus built for the Minotaur than of the ings by women of varying degrees of renown, TWorkman's Cottage is an unusually inti• diagrams of Euclid. Indeed, the classical beginning with the first published drawing mate instance in paintings that strive to cap• labyrinth (more symmetrical than truly (1878) by a woman architect, Margaret ture the vision and ambition of the archi• "labyrinthine") appears in more recent works Hicks, and concluding with late 20th-century tects with compositions that are emotionally such as Intersection (2001), which was seen designs by Gae Aulenti and Margreet reserved if nonetheless affecting. In the two in a concurrent show of Goldsleger's art Duinker. Though Goldsleger transforms the examples of housing conceived to connect from 1996 to 2002 at Kidder Smith Gallery in source material into often breathtaking art, multiple dwellings to communal kitchens— Boston. each painting is based on considerable his• Kitchenless House, Llano del Rio, California Those basic geometric forms recur in the torical study. (based on a 1914 project by Alice Constance 11 new encaustic paintings made in 2002-03 For most of the works, she also utilized a Austin) and Kitchenless House for Pacific at MOCA GA, but now the incised, creamy Rapid Prototype Machine (RPM), a tool of Colony, Block Design (inspired by Marie wax surfaces represent plans and diagrams contemporary industrial design that gener• Stevens Howland's work of 1885)—Goldsleger for realizable structures, many of which were ates three-dimensional models from comput• honors the proposal of efficient alterna• actually built in Chandigarh, San Francisco, er drawings. Goldsleger used the device at tive family organizations far removed from Dover, Mass., and elsewhere. The works in the Georgia Institute of Technology to form cozy domesticity. Sometimes, as in 30-36

Art in America 117 30-36 Wagenaar Street, Amsterdam, Holland (based on the architectural work ofMargreet Duinker, late 20th century), 2003, wax, oil, pigment, wood, resin, five panels, each 15% by 16'A by 2'A inches.

Wagenaar Street, Amsterdam, Holland, a Chicago, Illinois (after a design by Sophia of their achievements. Notwithstanding the five-panel work based on Duinker's designs Hayden), the results recall Goldsleger's earli• series's more overt documentary and femi• for housing with adjustable walls, the prag• er architectural inventions in the curiously nist aspects, Goldsleger's concern with the matically arranged floor plans reflect a mod• haunting quality of their spare lines and the conceptual space of architecture remains as ular geometry as pure as any in Goldsleger's selectivity with which she has chosen to over• intense as ever; it's just that the space is no less representational work. In Solar House, lay and transform the originals. longer placeless. She is, in other words, sud• Dover, Massachusetts (based on a design by That personal transformation of the denly grounded in the specifics of history, Eleanor Raymond that was constructed in sources is what makes these works vivid and this fact is a distinct departure for her. 1948) and Woman's Building from the homages to the largely underrecognized But not entirely. The geometry to which World's Columbian Exposition, 1893, women architects, and not mere reiterations her prior works refer is also grounded in his-

Solar House, Dover, Massachusetts (based on the architectural work of Eleanor Raymond, mid-20th century), 2003, wax, oil, pigment, wood, resin, 40 by 60 by 2 inches.

.18 March 2004 architects which she gathered in this exhibi• Despite the series's tion is factually determined and yet a revela• tion. The paragraphs on the walls and in the overt documentary catalogue tell the stories of real people who and feminist aspects, set particular goals and strove to meet them; Goldsleger's concern despite the obvious challenges of gender, this is not a tale of frustrated ambition. At with the conceptual space another level, though, this is Goldsleger's of architecture remains own Utopian community. United by her sen• as intense as ever; sibility and pictorial strategies, the women's designs for churches and cottages and it's just that the space kitchenless houses are acknowledged and is no longer placeless.

Woman's Building from the World's Columbia Exposition, 1893, Chicago, Illinois (based on the architectural work of Sophia Hoyden), 2003, wax, oil, pigment, wood, resin, linen, 54 by 80 by 1% inches.

tory, but it is the history of fantastic, ideal, reconstituted by a singular act of the imagi• An exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Cheryl ruined and mythic design. The relationship nation. Expanding the range of her imagery, Goldsleger, titled "utopia," appeared in Atlanta at the between the earlier work and its sources is Goldsleger deepens our comprehension of Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta less direct, as she channeled the structural what women have proposed and accom• fSepL 6-Nov. I J. Works by Goldsleger dating from 1996 to 2002 were exhibited at Kidder Smith Gallery, Boston energies of architectural history rather than plished in architecture. But she does so on [Sept 30-Nov. 1J. A new show will go on view tn New York delving into its catalogue of forms. For this her own terms, revealing new possibilities at Rosenburg & Konjffman Fine Art next fall reason, her oeuvre overall looks both familiar for the rigorous yet dreamlike geometry that and utterly strange. has distinguished her work from the begin• Author: Jerry Cullum is is a writer, editor and curator In similar fashion, the assembly of women ning. • living in Atlanta.

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