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Art: Elizabeth Ann James, Columnist
February 2006

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February 2006

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Delightful, powerful - She's "looking back"
Sandra Aska at JungHaus

"This Show? No, it's not actually a retrospective, but the selecgted work does go back around eight years, and personal experiences and childhood memories keep resurfacing, recycling, while I live and make art." - Sandra Aska

“Looking Back,” painting, collage, and assemblage by Sandra Aska will show at C.G. Jung Association’s JungHaus through February 25. This exhibit is a don’t miss, and it has been hung to perfection in the gorgeous JungHaus space. Five stars for the ambiance, the artist, and the curator, Claire Hagan.

She’s Versatile
In this exhibit, all of Sandra Aska’s paintings are figurative – acrylic on canvas or board. The artist paints in broad crude strokes, and she manages that technique, that tactic, with skill. Her palette is a rhapsody – warm and surprising in color choice and combinations.

Aska’s assemblages are original, well executed, and run the gamut of the startling earthy Fetishes to the cool, minimal egg titled Female, to the mysterious images behind lenses.

Her collages are also well executed; they have a way of ensnaring the viewer with hypnotizing slices and curves. They possess the complexity and skill that are the mark of a fine collagist. Including assemblage, collage, and paintings, there are 32 pieces in the show.

Nice To Be Remembered
“It’s nice to be remembered – cheaper to be forgotten.” This smallish photo collage, mostly black and white, takes its title from the message in a fortune cookie.

Aska and her mother Marguerite had a bittersweet, troubled relationship, and Marguerite died at the relatively young age of 56. Aska calls this “an ambiance piece.” It includes Aska’s own photo of half of her left hand. Near that floats a narrow strip from a magazine. It’s a woman’s face – I call her the Gainsborough Lady. The miniscule fortune is up there too, and the viewer can speculate about the real-life connection.

A few dried petals dot the lower left corner, and hand-drawn spirals similar to Buddha-snails float upward. Farther in there’s a petite permed-and-lipsticked Mom caught forever in a black-and-white snapshot, wearing a short-sleeved white blouse and dark glasses.

Aska has affixed a faded black-and-white wedding photo of her parents. The bride, Marguerite, sits hunched and happy, in a chair lower than her puff-chapeaued bridesmaids whose gowns possess Carmen Miranda flounces. “She’s taller than she looks here,”Aska reminisced.

The bride’s veil and her gauzy skirt resemble a pile of gray snow. The white shirts of the groomsmen gleam like daggers in the faded black-and-white milieu of a stylish yet modest ‘50s sitting room.

“Its definitely my grandmother’s house; I remember those small paintings of ships on the wall, “ Aska says. A dark shape, “just a dark section of a magazine,” hovers near the wedding party.

“One of the uncles fought in World War II,” Aska says. “He was captured and wounded, but he didn’t die. I think he’s the tall one across from my dad. And there I am, an infant, above the dark shape; you can hardly see me; and there I am again up near the blossom paper. I was kind of invisible. My dad died four years ago. My sister is two years younger, and I’m glad I’m close to her. My art isn’t separate from my personal experiences, my memories. And things keep evolving.”

Assemblage
“Looking Back” includes Aska’s notorious Fetishes. The term “notorious” is tongue in cheek. These three-dimensional objects are quite unusual, and they emanate a tinge of the sinister, the shamanic. They’re made of bone, and they’re made of lichens! One includes the roots of sea plants.

“I found it on the shore; they’re all found objects. In this one, Woman Warrior, I’ve used lichen and thyme.” Each Fetish is tubular and hangs from the wall. Aska’s Fetishes definitely speak of earth, sea, and organic matter.

One of her table assemblages, Female, is white, minimal, and includes an actual pristine goose’s egg. A drapery pull represents the female form, and there is a long slice of sharp glass held in place with a cool ridge of nails. Aska said the glass and nails represent the pain that accompanies sex, virginity, birth.

Her three lens assemblages, which radiate from beautiful centers, are gorgeous and must be seen to be believed. “And my lenses have to do with looking at the past through filters,” Aska said.

Aska’s assemblages and collages are sharp-edged, professional. Colors are deliberate, balanced. They do dance, and the longer you look, the more you see the dance.

More Collages
Dreaming of Waves Passing consists mainly of uneven strips, most of them cut-up memory photos collaged together. Waves, sands, greenery, leaves, a dream of being there. “Languor, dream-like ,” Aska remarks. Many of Aska’s collages possess one central figure, are somewhat haunting, and/or slyly tongue in cheek. A collaged gentleman, rather guru-like, sports-style savvy, sits in the center of Lord Asquith Says.

And what does Lord Asquith say? “Youth would be an ideal state if it came late in life.” Aska is a skilled photographer who enjoys digital photography. There are fine digital presentations in the show, and most of them include collage elements.

Paintings: The Letter

The Letter, around 36 x 40 inches, is grand in size and bold in execution. It is, in essence, an expressionist painting, and quite an appealing one. This solitary woman, visible from the mid-chest upward, is larger than life and possesses gray-white, hint-of-blue skin. Yet, her wistful eyes, her brick red lips, and the winsome shape of her face, make her seem alive, however mask-like.

Barely flesh-toned, her upper arms and her clasped hands nest like white herons under her chin. Although she’s not a petite woman and has been painted in big tough strokes, this woman is vulnerable, sensitive. Yet, she is modern. Her brown-auburn hair hangs full and straight, and she’s wearing something strapless. Her brown eyes, not quite matching, stare sadly past us into the room. Only a strip of dark red bodice can be seen.

She’s sitting on a blue kitchen chair; we see the top of it. On the left the artist has painted lines suggesting venetian blinds. The reading table beside the woman is blue-green, painted like the chair, and holds a vase of tall crudely painted flowers that barely suggest actual blooms. They’re wild and marvelous. Near the vase lies the portentous letter, blank, white, mysterious.

In Forgiveness, a life-size diptych, two pensive drawn-with-paint figures face each other. They are women in long dresses; their hair tied back in Greek goddess-style, and their similar pose is one of expectation and contrition. Forgiveness typifies Aska’s ability to express a mood or emotion with simple colors and a few lines. “What’s it about?” Aska says, “I think it’s important, forgiveness, and requires effort and thought.”

In A Fine Balance, a life-sized tall and sturdy dark-skinned man in a business suit stands sideways on a pedestal. He’s on the balls of his shoes, balancing. He gazes into a precipice we cannot see, and he’s trying to balance an orange ball in his hands which are behind him, as though for handcuffs. “He was always on the top and about to lose his equilibrium, and looking down.” Again, the artist provokes speculation.

In Seance, three women ponder colored balls at a table. Again, the colors are muted but wild. The women have painty-white skin, and everything works together.

Woman with a Brownie is wonderful, takes the cake! Her red versus green, her orange versus blue, her fudgy strokes, exemplify what Aska does with paint line and color.

More than one acquaintance has compared Sandra Aska, the painter, to Jawlensky – remember Alexej Jawlensky’s Schokko with Red Hat from the Sirak Collection?
Jawlensky’s Schokko with Red Hat, for example, employs the same green-tinged skin and red apparel as does Aska’s delicious Woman with a Brownie! Yet, Aska herself was not familiar with the Russian-born German Expressionist Painter, 1864-1941.

Despite all this panache, this boldness, Aska manages to infuse her paintings with delicacy, sensitivity. And therein lies the appeal.

Portrait of the Artist as a Timeless Woman
Sandra Aska attended Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) for a year and a half. Before that she began her formal art activities by learning to enamel, to make jewelry, at what would later be called the Columbus Cultural Arts Center. Later, she earned a bachelor of arts degree in art education with minors in photography and women’s studies from The Ohio State University. Her art can be found in numerous private and public collections and her work has shown at the Ohio Art League, at the Columbus Museum of Art, and as a juried member in the Ohio Art League, as well as at the Mount Vernon Nazarene College Art Gallery.

“I’ve made art since I can remember,” Aska tells me. “Personal experience is woven into all my work. ... I like putting things together, collage. And I’ve become more interested in digital photography. Painting is difficult, but I perservere.”

When asked about painters she admires, Aska responds, “Richard Deibenkorn, his luscious paint. I want my paint to become luscious, my paint to achieve form.” She likes Milton Avery and loves to look at the art of Georges de La Tour from the sixteenth century. “His people have eye contact with you. I like that – something happens.”

When she’s not making art Aska works at The Institute for Human Services, a private non-profit organization that advocates for children. She likes all kinds of music, popular and jazz and loves being outdoors when she can. And she reads. One of her recent “reads” was the best selling The Kite Runner about Pakistan and Afghanistan; her cat Yo Yo Ma Ma was helping her hold the book as we spoke. “But there are no cats in my paintings,” she says.

Aska has a home studio which is “ hot in summer, cold in winter.”

The Women
Although she’s never actually painted in an organized group of women, Aska does belong to a women artists group who meet monthly.

“They are my peers and my mentors. Their examples, their support. Their ability to do their work, their struggle to do it, the quality of their work. Women artists in Columbus are strong, and they all connect with each other in some way, particularly the older ones. Yes my work reflects me; I have to keep doing it.”

“Looking Back” is lively, original, well executed, now and forward looking! Go Sandy, go!

C.G. Jung Association’s JungHaus Gallery is located at 59 West Third Avenue. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday 11 a.m. to 2 pm and by appointment. Call 614-291-8050.

 

© 2006 Short North Gazette, Columbus, Ohio. All rights reserved.