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On Every Link A Heart Does Dangle
December 1 2022 - January 15 2023
Hillman-Jackson Gallery at Bard College at Simon’s Rock
Great Barrington, MA
Exhibition Text by Em Rooney and Chris Domenick
Nine drawings, three furniture and sculpture assemblages, and four chairs currently occupy the Hillman Jackson Gallery. The drawings are made by the young artist Isabella De Matteo, and the three-dimensional work (with the exception of the sand-cast glass starfish that are a part of Triptych Table which were made by Isabella) were made by the slightly less young artist Scarlett McCalman. I mention their age right off the bat, not to be in the least diminutive, but rather to let the reader and looker be startled by the seriousness, and completion each work possesses.
Isabella and Scarlett are New Yorkers. They went to Cooper Union and MICA, respectively, and it is easy enough, although it would be wrong, to attribute their “seriousness,” if that’s what we’re calling it, to their education and location. What seems more likely is that they found in each other kindred spirits. Isabella met Scarlett when she did a summer pre-college program at MICA when she was just about to be a senior in High School and Scarlett had just graduated from their painting department. Scarlett moved back to New York around the same time that Isabella graduated high school and started school at Cooper. They had stayed in touch and after Isabella’s first semester of college, the two began to date. The years passed, and their lives merged. It is strange to see such young people display prolonged devotion to one another. It is so romantic.
As their work developed alongside each other a direction emerged to their shared artistic gaze. Isabella looks towards Scarlett and towards her friends, and Scarlett looks away from Isabella towards the past, toward the home that she shared with her godparents, the caretaking done there, the inspiration they elicited, the mess they left for Scarlett to clean up. When we picked up the work for this exhibition, I watched as each piece got wrapped and removed from Scarlett and Isabella’s apartment, which was, like many New York City apartments, controlled chaos with intention and necessity interwoven at every spot the eye could land.
The checkered motif and the scale of Isabella’s drawings conjure (and sometimes include) stamps, coins, and patches of quilt. They’re sweet and stick their tongue out at the idea that sweetness is a bad thing in the realm of capital A art. Within them, they reflect a world both big and small. Their materials evoke a modest studio practice and the small spaces we’re forced to contend with in order to be urban dwellers, to live near culture, and community. Within that space, though, they reflect the tactile and interconnected life of friends in the city; a board game, a wet poncho, knick-knacks on St. Marks, and the rare, precious citing of a beautiful and still moth.
Isabella’s motifs scatter within each work and interrupt their contained subjects—the drawn, etched, or frottaged, intervenes. Like a game of emerging appearances, the viewer meanders across these pages. Designs and subjects feel nonhierarchical and interchangeable, sometimes reappearing as a framing device or a central point of entry. The pattern of a shirt scrambled Scrabble letters, and the repeated appearance of hands in various states of caress reflect Isabella herself gluing squares of leather, maneuvering the fragile Kozo paper, and arranging of objects on a surface. It is a tight system of pictures and objects, processed through an idiosyncratic mode of collecting, arranging, recording, and acknowledging each of these acts by revealing them as subjects. I keep thinking about film noir, and the mystifying crop of some of these scenes, offering a lens into a private environment, yet withholding and secretive in their declarations.
Isabella’s province is mirrored by Scarlett’s austere furniture. These functional works strive for perfection—in this sense, care is latent—one notices the subtle way glass sits on a lip, hand-carved joints of various hardwoods abutt, the rewarding and uninterrupted slide of a drawer, and the curved shape of a body’s imprint on the seat of a chair. This language of touch is only achieved through studious immersion in the craft of woodworking. Pedestals and platforms for knick-knacks, storage for clutter, seats for bodies, all capitalizing on the mundane aspects of domestic furniture, which in their shared home, and less so in this exhibition, foreground utility rather than the dogged, corporeal transformation of materials.
The labor is palpable, silent, and permeating from the imagined interior space of rooms belonging to loved ones. Scarlett’s drawn portraits of her godparents, the posthumous typewriter-written letters to them with their names obscured by matchsticks, and the hand-carved alabaster heads (one with only bone rendered, the other with stoney flesh) reflect the way that all things collected, owned, and lived with become memento mori. A shared life with an artist is one that is constantly documented, consciously manifesting images, forms, dust, trinkets, detritus all of which can become bits of the stories we tell to each other for posterity. This is where two artists meet; amongst scraps of mugwort and dirty socks on the floor where I watched Scarlett dump the drawers of their shared bedside table to prepare it for its new contents, and for this exhibition. A noticeable hole was left in their small bedroom-- another absence or change of texture, to be recorded and remembered.
