Threshold is Analisa Teachworth’s first solo exhibition at Zaza’ Milan. The artist presents two morphologically dissimilar bodies of work: an ongoing series of large-scale, encaustic wax paintings enclosing layered, liquid, at times cavernous horizons and a fragment from a set of free-standing, intentionally damaged glass sculptures. The works, both broad and deep, perimeter the space and surround the visitor physically while suggesting other spatial and perceptive sways that lie at the thresholds between observation and imagination.
See, perhaps, a row of milky satellites, a caving storm, a hill or a valley, a ravine, or something more alive, what do you hear? An encounter with these works evokes as many different images, sounds, emotions, or memories as there are viewers, whether or not we can grasp the possibility and depth of all these perceptive folds and fields—which are the artist’s interior, yet connected to the world.
Wax, as a material, is a by-product generated by the vital activity of bees. In Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of imagination, “works of art are the by-products of [the] existentialism of imagining beings”; the “real product” is a widening of consciousness and, one might add, an acknowledgment that reality and fiction are not diametrically opposed. There are things that exist within the stuff of matter itself—and because of it—which we might not immediately perceive.
Glass, glassine, glasshouse, glassily, shards of glass, fragments. Think for a moment about all the ways in which this transmutable material is employed benevolently and nefariously. Think about fragility and what may have been done to it, accidentally or on purpose, once it was erected to protect, distance, or affect what lies on either side of it.
The four paintings and glass sculpture, a fragment of Alter 1, but more specifically, the paintings – Feed, Fall from Us, and dyptic Filter 1 & 2, bring about questions on the origins of and associations we make with abstraction and its expressive intentions or reverberations. Painting with living matter means indulging in the vitality of aliveness and engaging in a conversation that is larger than art. Teachworth’s explicit reverie for the holistic simultaneously expands and breaks apart worlds. The material grammar of her form of abstraction reflects a meditative rather than formal relationship to aesthetics, suggesting boundlessness.
A physical threshold is usually understood as a visible and, therefore, “transparent” marker of separation. It also denotes a limit beyond which one cannot proceed without shifting into a different stage or form. It is at once limit and potential, depending on how it is deployed. The liminal sits on either side of a threshold, cutting through time and space and cracking hegemonic understandings of where truth lies. Teachworth’s experimentations with matter flow from a narrative logic that invites the viewer into a spatiality that rejects extractive forms of categorization and fracture. Rather, they embrace the interconnected architectural profoundness of matter and beings and the active energies these can generate when they are not contained.
—Chiara Siravo
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