ART PAPERS
E. M. Donahue Gallery
November 17 - January 7

NANCY AZARA
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Nancy Azara"s investigations into female identity relate to early feminism's preoccupation with body cavities and genitalia as sources of vitality and self-definition. Her later works have evolved to a deeper, more complex understanding of women as sites of multiple, interacting forces. In this recent exhibit, Azara integrates the body's interior -- its compound of organs, blood, and muscle, feelings, and sensation -- to a context of the transcendent self. This interior, physical self is represented by rounded or elongate forms, painted dull brown or red, that dynamically interact with other devices that suggest a worldly and/or transcendental exterior skin. Thus, gold painted, carved wooden armatures support or surround the abstracted organs or spaces comprising the center, marking off tentative boundaries that consort with the heavens and negotiate terms with community. Other areas of silvery-white paint, layered over crimson, seem to designate a transitory state: an interior spirituality that extends to an outer plane.

Spirit House of the Mother anchors the show: this resplendent and mysterious house draws the viewer into its domain. Tall and narrow, made of brilliantly gilded wood planks, it is covered all over with oval forms that are roughly carved in shallow relief. These shapes, together with deep tool marks that are allowed to remain on the surface, signify human action -- specifically the imprints of Azara's body. Opening into a simple, dark, light-absorbing crimson interior, an altar-like wall stands in front of us. With the outside carving repeated here, this sacred wall is painted a glowing, reflective, silvery-white that reveals glimpses of its crimson underpainting. At our feet lies a low platform of nine silvery crimson squares, each carved with a spiral. While the house's wooden construction suggests the necessary toughness of exterior structures, of walls and skin, its indentations remind us that brittle exteriors are vulnerable, too. Houses and chapels may be societal constructions for communal use, but they are also marked by the humans who make and use them. Conversely, the spirals at our feet draw us down, inside: energy flows from our skin (the house's golden shell) through our bodies, into the bosom of the earth. Being a spiral, the energy then reverses itself, pulling the dark interior out to light and air.

Although less ambitious in complexity and scale, Azara's small wall reliefs deal with similar themes. These reliefs are also made of painted, carved wood, in addition to various organic, found materials that often have personal meanings that Azara associates with specific places or events. These private associations are unimportant in themselves, but they imbue her works with significance through their use. Forming a picture plane and structure for Veiled Goddess is a 15"x 12" section of gold-painted plank that calls to mind a torso. A spiral gouges its surface, which is then framed on both edges by wooden dowels that look like arms. Centered on top sits a bulbous and very sensuous coconut shell that could be read as a head, a heart, or a lung. Forked branches painted dark crimson descend from this bulb: arteries coursing with life forces and complex visual relationships. The spiral draws our attention from sensuous bulb and red flow to the limits of its flat, yet transcendent support and back out again. All is hemmed in by the "arms," the connection between interior life and gallery wall.

Azara's sophisticated manipulation of color, shape, carved marks, and light are here transformed into metaphors for home and chapel, for the physicality of the body and the spirituality associated with both art and religion. The roots of her work may be found in the Italian-Catholic background from which she emerged, searching for new ways to comprehend life's meaning beyond the sensate and material, and to investigate the hidden and secret meanings submerged beneath the surface of things. While this search for meaning remains the same, Azara has extended her spiritual investigations from Catholic patriarchy to feminist studies of goddess cultures and to Buddhism. Her oval imprints resemble the Buddha's footprints, which can be seen at sacred sites all over Asia. These footprints are ancient abstract and iconoclastic symbols of the Buddha's presence, signs of the absent body. However, Azara's use of the goddess metaphor can be misleading. While goddess symbolism is sometimes criticized as simplifying and limiting female sources of identity to their reproductive organs, Azara extends this trope by representing the goddess as an evolving social construct, a fresh way of thinking about how women can create new, nourishing, and powerful identities within a materialistic and cynical society that is often bereft of meaning. 

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.