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Gallery 10, Ltd.'s exhibition at Gallery Art Factory in Prague was housed in a huge industrial space under steel I beams and rows of fluorescent lights. The artists were presented with the formidable challenge of filling this space with work which had to be conceived of beforehand without any prior knowledge of the actual spatial setting.

Participating artists included Anne J. Banks, Lucy Blankstein, Melissa Burley, Maxine Cable, Sabine Carlson, Nancy Cusick Fox, Adrienne Heinrich, Joan Poole Holbrook, Nancy Hersch Ingram, Gary Irby, Ivona Kaz-Jepsen, Mary Virginia Langston, Ruth Levine, Carol Lukitsch, Gloria Monteiro Rall, Emily Rose, Ellouise Schoettler, Pat Segnan, Sarah Stout, Claudia Vess and Gail Watkins.

Hung from the ceiling and attached to walls, the works were composed of industrial materials, found objects, collages and photographs, all of which could be disposed of at the end of the show. The irregularity of the walls allowed for nooks and alcove settings as well as wider expanses for large pieces which functioned as backdrops for freestanding three dimensional pieces on the floor. The concept of art made of industrial and throwaway materials in a functional industrial space integrated the work with the space and reflected the reality of our disposable society.

The theme of the show was introduced with a single Blue Suitcase marked with a red X set under a funnel shaped projection from the ceiling. The Blue Suitcase had become a symbol of Gallery 10's use of a blue suitcase to carry work to many exchange exhibitions in Italy and other sites where the Gallery has exhibited nationally and internationally. Melissa Burley's innovative lead-in showed a path on the floor with hundreds of tiny blue suitcases flowing out from under the lid of a large blue suitcase. A sign invited people to take one for a souvenir.

Travel and suitcase themes were expressed by several artists. Claudia Vess's 8 foot high three piece hanging installation, Blue Moon, was infused with images of blue suitcases, which could be hung in three different orientations in a triangle or as columns. Carol Lukitsch's two installations, Fortune (Chinese Takeout) and American Dream alluded to the American notion of travel as a way to pursue the American Dream in the optimistic desire to displace misfortune and make everything right. In Fortune, Chinese food take out boxes, chopsticks and fortune cookies were attached to a satin brocade hanging. American Dream presented this optimism with an outline of the artist's body painted on a scroll of handmade Asian paper festooned with sprouts, dried flowers and fresh green leaves. Gail Watkins' mixed media piece featured a 7" x 5" scroll hung with old Czech money, a tongue-in-cheek reference to a nostalgic traveling past. Nancy Hersch Ingram emphasized those ever recurring travel hazards in her two works, Lost Luggage and Baggage Claim, metaphors for destruction and the pain of loss, then the joy of recovery and reclamation that we all experience in life. Lucy Blankstein's, Three Banners, depicted images of Botticelli's Birth of Venus, an icon for fashion and female make-over, with a mask of the artist emerging from a blue suitcase.

Pat Segnan's A Map of Where We are Now, consisted of five 14 foot scrolls of white translucent paper, depicting the linear outlines of the map of the European continent, its rivers and the city of Prague, drawn in varying colors. Suspended from the ceiling and allowed to puddle on the floor, the panels, floating within the ambient space, spoke of wider scope of the world travel and alluded to the path of Gallery 10's traveling shows.

Finally, guest artist, Tish Carter's Monologues from a Blue Suitcase, presented a Dance/Performance which combined dance, visual art, music and light. She utilized the gallery space to create a moving experience of dance and a metaphor for travel, while carrying a blue suitcase through the gallery. Her background wall painting and figure sculpture were enhanced by a painting of a large pair of eyes on the floor which gave an impression of the voyeuristic traveler as well as being a metaphor for a total theater experience integrated with movement in space.

Works representing the theme of family travel and stories were lung like banners from the overhead, or on walls illuminated by ambient light from the surrounding space. Other pieces formed triangular shapes hung with papers, photographs recording ordinary and personal events. Emily Rose's hanging triangle was generously festooned with throwaway items discarded from the street and beach. It celebrated a life lived fully and exuberantly in the world. Ellouise Schoettler celebrated her work War Isn't the Way, as a hanging book, a colorful grid of collages and photographs manipulated in the computer which told her story of family folklore and tradition. Ivona Kaz-Jepsen's work depicting life in America formed a teepee structure decorated with her photo students' test strips and film canisters. A roll of black landscaping fabric showed photos of her family with symbols painted around them. The family theme was also told by Joan Holbrook's laminated photographs shown in the form of a rug and a wall hanging.

Adrienne Heinrich's Rapunzel, recalled the fairy story of the princess in the tower shown as a hanging cascade of golden hair, intermingled with delicate ribbons and glass beads, flowing down to puddle on the floor. Rapunzel's beautiful hair is the means by which the prince can climb the tower to rescue her and by which her sisters can also climb to the heights to fulfill their own aspirations, a prophetic metaphor for women's future freedom and fulfillment.

Individual statements seen in the large standing sculptures, were innovative in defining the space of the gallery. Sarah Stout's multiple paneled piece of black transparent triangles was set in the space like a butterfly with folding wings. Maxine Cable's two room-size installations carried her theme of Buddhist symbolism and the concept of impermanence. Found objects such as toy dinosaurs evoked the extinction of powerful creatures and the decay and renewal of the world system. Cable's assemblages, set with blue umbrellas, large spheres (beach balls) and stupa forms, were metaphors for diverse belief systems, artifacts which evoked a new world order of the past, present and future.

Sabine Carlson's five white translucent standing panels evoked the image of multiple trees in a forest within a mysterious space of concentrated light. Drawn on fabric, and read as abstract sculpture, Carlson's 6-foot panels related to the kinetic movement of mobiles activated by light and air. Moving and changing ambiguously from top to bottom, the images evoked a feeling of being in a forest of mysterious moving shapes.

Mary Virginia Langston's piece using ribbons of yellow police tape marked, "Caution," hung in a pyramidal shape from the ceiling, was the most innovative in presenting the concept of how industrial materials can be integrated together within an industrial environment. The space inside the yellow pyramid was filled with white shredded material and surrounded with piles of black body bags, transforming the whole piece into a cautionary statement of urban disaster. The bags and the shredded material refer to the information concealed in shredded documents, i.e., personal identities, government and medical information, secret numbers which have been destroyed or displaced. The CAUTION tape reminds us to be aware, cautious that information about our personal lives is being withheld in the shredded materials which end up in body bags around the world.

The theme of the artist was brilliantly expressed by Gary Irby's stunning life size black figures on backgrounds of colored spangles carrying the human theme of the artists in the show. Nancy Cusick Fox's blue hand prints of working gloves on the wall and Anne Banks' photographs of herself, Fox and Gloria Rall pulling prints in the studio reinforced the theme of artists' works in progress. In Ruth Levine's, Torture, horizontal panels of small rectangles containing mysterious writings (for communications) alluded to Abu Ghraib and/or Kafka's Penal Colony, anonymous writings referring to unspeakable things.

Mystery itself was evoked in Gloria Monteiro Rall's beautiful non-objective paintings, Prague I and Prague II, statements of pure color, shape and form.

A milestone exhibition such as this is a brilliant example of how the creativity and innovation of these Gallery 10 artists have utilized ordinary materials to make significant statements about the transforming power of art.

The Prague Biennial was concurrent with the Gallery 10 Exhibition

Anne J. Banks
 

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