New Art Examiner
December 1994
Museum of Contemporary Art

Hollis Sigler
By Claire Wolf Krantz

 In the climate of the ‘70s radical feminism, Hollis Sigler was an early innovator of certainstylistic devices that now serve her well in the remarkable series exhibited here. For years, her awkward, faux-naïve  drawing style and use of painted frames and written texts have facilitated a fresh way of investigating untraditional subject matter and personal data. In her recent “Breast Cancer Journal” series, she has expanded her focus to address complex issues related to breast cancer, making works that not only express personal emotions such as pain, fear, rage, and hope, but also chronicle related societal issues involving the disease’s incidence, possible causes, and treatment.

Oil and oil-pastel paintings in intense hues depict  settings in which the (generally absent) author pictorially enacts the interpersonal dramas of her life. Informational and expressive texts embellish these tense scenes, often appearing n banners depicted within the images or on the spacers and frames of her paintings. Her work always has a drawn quality; the vigor and intense color of her background strokes enhance the tension of her uncomfortable drawing, creating a consistent surface effectively holding the disparate elements together.

Compressing histories of personal events and artistic innovations, Sigler’s 1992 painting Walking With The Ghosts of My Grandmother considers vaious implications of our society’s behavior toward women and the environment. Presenting a scene of blood-streaked earth topped by drooping trees and a hill (a burial mound?), Sigler covers the sky with vertical red paint-strokes to imply pollution and acid rain, which are believed to precipitate some cancers. Several generations of bloodied women’s clothing are strewn about, surrounded by blank mirrors and empty dressing tables, signifying women’s common histories, conflated with those of the artist’s ancestors. The most interesting section of the image incorporates a classical Greek statue. Still often considered the ideal of female and artistic beauty, this heroic, headless, winged woman illustrates our acceptance of violence agains the femal body, while Sigler’s use of naturalism and the central position of the figure indicate the artistic traditions which which the artist has broken. The statue represents a dead civilization, whose traces emain to be worshipped, valorized, and mythologized; it’s a Lacanian object a, the surplus that exists only in its effects.

In some paintings, such as To Kiss The Spirits; Now This is What It Is Really Like, Sigler presents and unfolding personal spirituality, while in others she employs devices such as leafless trees with their branches chopped off, frail splints holding some of the broken parts together, to indicate mutilation, emptiness, and terror.

This show reflected Sigler’s hard-won artistic and personal maturity. Neither stylish nor comfortable, her paintings combine significant affective and discursive content, revealing that political acts need not be separated from the emothional and intellectual basis from which they arise.

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.