MARFA — On August 1, an art exhibition of new, monumental works by Katherine Shaughnessy opened at The Do Right Hall in Marfa. The works in the exhibition study and reflect on the nearby border and the complexities associated with its geography, history and politics. Shaughnessy’s Broken is a 23 x 9-foot wall installation which the artist made over the past five years out of 308 carved birch panels with plaster inlay. Each 8 x 8-inch panel, from top left to bottom right, shows approximately 9 square miles of land along a section of the Rio Grande, from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, that has served to delineate the U.S./Mexico border since 1848. In this quiet, monochromatic work, Shaughnessy methodically whittled out the river with wood tools, filled in the negative space with plaster and then sanded until smooth. Each wooden board is part U.S.A. and part Mexico in varying proportions. Across each board is an ever-changing, chalky white, vascular line representing the river. As the river undulates, sometimes Mexico is north of the United States, while at other times small islands of land appear caught in the middle of the flow.
There are two massive aneurysms — formed by dams at Amistad Reservoir and Falcon Lake — that take over the visual surface creating several, nearly solid, white panels. For Shaughnessy, this work is an attempt to celebrate this shared waterway and to blur, erase and discuss the imaginary line that runs down the middle, a boundary that has animated political discourse for decades.
Complementary is a 3 x 5-foot handwoven textile made of red, white, green and blue cotton threads. After deconstructing, thread by thread, a Mexican flag and an American flag, the artist wove those same threads back together using a loom. The result is an earthen-colored, loosely woven, hemmed banner with a single light blue stripe running vertically down the middle.
The overall proportion and presence of grommets are the only features suggesting a flag, since the resulting muted tones have made it lose all evident emblematic power. Through this subtle decomposing and recomposing gesture, the artist conceives of a blending of the two nations at their most symbolic level. The idea for this piece came to Shaughnessy during a lecture by Hervé Vanel at American University in Paris who was presenting his new book, Jasper Johns Le Chewing-Gum et La Colle, that discusses Jasper Johns’ and Donald Judd’s “Negative flags” from 1968. Their flags reimagined the American flag in which the colors were swapped out for their opposite, or complementary, colors — green for red, orange for blue, black for white, etc.
The resulting flags were both political statements of disapproval of the Vietnam War and, in Johns’ case, the conjuring of an optical phenomenon. Viewers were encouraged to stare at the negative flag and then move their gaze to an adjacent gray field where the Stars and Stripes momentarily righted in their mind’s eye back to red, white and blue.
Similarly, Shaughnessy is playing with complementary colors — weaving together green and red, in addition to white and blue, taken from the U.S.A and Mexican flags. From a distance, the viewer sees mostly brown and only upon close inspection do the colors reveal themselves.
The gallery is open Fridays and Saturdays from 1-5 p.m. and by appointment. (Call 432-386-0386.) A closing reception will be held on Saturday, August 30,, from 6 to 8 p.m. at The Do Right Hall at 110 W. Dallas, Marfa. All are welcome.
Katherine Shaughnessy (b. 1970) is an artist living and working in Boise, Idaho. She is also the co-founder and curator of The Common Well, an artist workspace and contemporary gallery in Garden City, Idaho.
She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997. Shaughnessy has had solo exhibitions in Chicago, Marfa and Albuquerque, and her work has been in group shows at The Cleveland Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, Boise Art Museum and Sun Valley Museum of Art in Ketchum, Idaho. Shaughnessy makes paintings, drawings, sculpture, textiles, assemblage, installation and videos examining our natural and political worlds and their awkward and sometimes brutal intersection with human demands and desires. Having lived in and around Marfa from about 2002 until 2016, Shaughnessy says that coming home to unveil this work was always part of the plan. The Do Right Hall, located in an 1886 adobe building that was the first church in Marfa, has served as a contemporary art space for nearly 20 years. The Do Right Hall is owned and operated by artist Campbell Bosworth and Buck Johnston. Past exhibitions include works by Ethan Cook, Kate Shepherd, Elizabeth Hohimer and many local Marfa artists.