Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
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May 24–31, 2001
art
Goddess Worship
Marilyn Pappas
Through May 26, Snyderman Gallery, 303 Cherry St., 215-238-9576
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The muses live: Two by Marilyn Pappas, Nike of Samothrace with Golden Wing and Fragment of Artemis from Gabii. | |
For the past seven years, Marilyn Pappas has been working with Herculean tenacity on her Muse Series, a group of life-size embroidered pictures of Classic Greek sculptures of women on linen. This multimedia artist had returned with gusto, after a 20-year hiatus, to the fibers field she helped to create. Pappas’ themes in her new work are an unusual hybrid of archaeology and feminism, and her use of the traditional and genteel women’s pastime of embroidery to interpret them in monochrome seems at the same time idiosyncratic and oddly appropriate.
Despite the narrow limitations of Pappas’ media and subject matter, there’s more to this work than first meets the eye. The female figures are stitched in black, white and neutral tones on cut-out panels that are appliquéd onto flat sheets of unbleached linen. A few have richly colored gold wings or jewelry. The more you look the more visual pleasure you can find in the surface itself: the direction and nature of the individual stitches, patterns, harsh or subtle value shifts, surprising depth here and there, and so on.
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In Nike of Samothrace with Golden Wing a headless figure made up almost entirely of swirling drapery with one gold wing floats in the center of a 13-foot length of floor-to-ceiling fabric. The drapery around the goddess becomes, as Pappas says, "a magical repository of power," while the gold wing is an intoxicatingly rococo touch in the field of monochrome. The joyous expansiveness of Nike is countered by the moody and compressive Fragments of Artemis from Gabii. Here a mysterious woman holds a thick clump of her voluminous gown, and embroidered folds of fabric extend outward into real folds. A tiny embroidered fragment, Small Fragment of Aphrodite’s Hand, is especially charming. A thumb and four fingers lightly hold a massive bundle of folded fabric that dissolves into raw and irregular edges. The piece appears to be a relic (the fingers of Saint?), but also serves as a reminder of the iconoclasm that defaced so many sculptures throughout the centuries.
It is distressing to see all of these scarred, dismembered female bodies (they invoke battered women, breast cancer and the aging process we all face) — but somehow this distress is mollified by the idealism of the sculptures and Pappas’ labors. Even in this imperfect world, Pappas seems to be saying, the goddess lives.
