When you enter the first gallery, the "Thinking Room" as it's called, of the Natasha Nicholson: The Artist in Her Museum exhibit, you see an inviting cream-colored divan. It sits amidst lovingly arranged pieces of artwork by Nicholson's friends. On expansive display at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) until November 8th, this is an exhibit that keeps drawing me back.
This astounding show lures you to take meditative rest. It acts as a kind of comfortable chair in a quiet space after a tiring day. My most fruitful visit took place on September 22nd, when I attended a tour led by the petite yet formidable Ms. Nicholson herself. She shared her thoughts & feelings about this major exhibit of her art, more or less as she displays it at home.
Silent Buddha (2014), Nicholson's somber assemblage, is situated at an appropriate entry point. It harkens you mysteriously to her work: a 6-inch black wooden statuette stands inside a frame against a white wall, its right hand severed, its head bound with red thread. It's an attractive, enigmatic, vaguely ominous presence.
Nicholson admitted to our group of twenty visitors that she finds it hard to leave these things after spending hours at MMoCA, as she is wont to do. Born in wartime (1945), Nicholson says that she arranged her personal "treasures" with secretive devotion as a girl growing up in St. Louis. This self-described autodidact seems to have had a precocious artist's eye as well as a keen collector's enthusiasm at a tender age.
Surprisingly for someone so clearly cultivated, so fond of foreign objects, Nicholson said that she didn't visit Europe until she was 30 years old. "How you live with objects is important," Nicholson told us. She said that she prefers to gather "precise and consistent" things. She gets them everywhere: from the sidewalks around her Schenk's Corners studios, at estate sales & thrift stores, even via the Internet.
The objects that Nicholson has curated & arranged in the four MMoCA gallery spaces struck this appreciative viewer as charming, eccentric, even eerie. Surrounded by a rusty iron rocking-horse frame, an age-faded Chinese lamp, a"spirit painting" of a dead child (circa 1840), glass-tipped titanium electrical thread & a thousand other odd items, the wondering mind is encouraged to delight in the rich, diversity of human products.
In the "Studiolo" (Italian term for cabinet of curiosities), for example, a tall shelf of books, mostly about art & culture, rises high beside an armchair upholstered with West African beadwork. The walls of Nicholson's replica parlor ("always in flux," she explained) are painted dark green. She displays items ranging from Bavarian hunting amulets to a "dumb piano," a one-third-scale piano keyboard that folds into a black wooden box, used for practice while traveling.
The "Bead Room" gently guides you to the exit, which doubles as the entrance to MMoCA's fine museum store. As you pass the silent parade of objects - beaded jewelry, embroidery, photos & drawings - you get a sense of what Nicholson means when she says that she was influenced more by painting than sculpture.
In the final ramped wall-space, you can enjoy images of models & masterpiece paintings from fashion magazines which, Nicholson explains, are a "source of ideas and connections" for her. The artist embodies the spirit of sharing that art & culture strives to achieve. She is generous with her creative output, allowing us to observe her personal possessions in this large, yet intimate MMoCA exhibit.
Nicholson offers a kind of post-modern silent Doll's House for adult art-lovers. Henrik Ibsen would've appreciated it: "Hedda Gabler & A Doll's House center on female protagonists whose almost demonic energy proves both attractive & destructive for those around them. While Hedda has few similarities with Nora in A Doll's House, many of today's audiences & theatre critics find Hedda's intensity & drive to be more complex, less comfortably explained than Nora's rather routine feminism." [- Wikipedia, Henrik Ibsen, edited]
Please see this inspiring MMoCA show before it's dismantled next month. You'll feel right at home, meaning occasionally discomfited with the world & its artifacts.
Links:
http://www.mmoca.org/exhibitions-collection/exhibits/natasha-nicholson-artist-her-museum
http://natashanicholson.blogspot.com/p/cabinet-of-curiosities.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen
