Last month, we all got a lesson in the power of negative space: that shift into the eclipse's moment of totality, when the moon's position moved just a little and everything was suddenly different, newly luminous, with the sun's halo redefining the moon. "Black Quilts," Elise Whittemore's exhibition of monoprints at Soapbox Arts in Burlington, recalls that moment.
Her suite of abstract, geometric prints creates a musical movement across the gallery walls; she repeats forms, rotating, overlapping or flipping them, providing a sense of tempo and rhythm. "They all work off the idea of a quilt block, laying down a simple shape in a quadrant, then rotating it and repeating it to build out a pattern," the Grand Isle artist described in an email. "I like the idea of simple building blocks creating something complex and changing, and the sense of time and space traversed."
Some of the artist's pieces are actually quilted. She sews multiple prints together with near-perfect stitches to create larger compositions, adding the striking visual element of a black dashed line to her geometries. All the pieces appear tactile, from the thread to the richness of the black ink to the impressions of the printing plates in the paper. That gives her monochromatic palette breadth and visual interest.
By printing white on top of black, and then sometimes again as a "ghost" on top of white paper, Whittemore achieves a range of ink tones and textures. This is especially apparent in "Black Quilt (Wander)," where many permutations seem like they're marching all over the place.
It makes sense that Whittemore comes to this work with a background in graphic design and layout. Every inch of the frame is considered, especially the negative space and the balance between elements. One pleasant surprise is that her work isn't fussy. Traces of ink remain from the edges of her plexiglass plates and vellum shapes; misregistrations are imprinted in the paper. These reveal a physical process of investigation more than an exercise in perfect printmaking.
Whittemore's attention to graphic precision is well balanced with her clear love of material and process. Gallerist Patricia Trafton said one visitor described the prints as "juicy but handsome."
Seeing the show soon after Frank Stella's death on May 4 made this viewer think of his Black Paintings (1958-1960). He was pursuing a way of painting that didn't include representation, emotion or anything other than the process of putting paint on canvas — a record of stripes, leaving thin lines of raw canvas that delineate the brush's path. Whittemore's project isn't as ambitious as upending abstract expressionism, but she also has a minimalist's appreciation of art's formal qualities.
Especially with her "Claimed/Unclaimed" series, Whittemore thinks about space and its possibilities. She describes her process as "figurative action taking place, and again, being reconsidered, moving in a different direction."