| Sandra Scolnik's self has colonized everyone
it meets. Scolnik paints tiny genre paintings in which every character
in a tightly confined interior space is a self-portrait-her face on each
figure. With her body of diminutive paintings - some smaller than six-by-eight
inches - Sandra Scolnik confederates tense, constricted psychological
dramas, generating a corpus of dreamlike works that interrogate the tangled
nexus of self.
Common experience suggests that "The
human head is the chief vehicle of social intercourse, through expressive
conversation; and we usually expect the representations of heads to embody
such lively qualities of the features as would be conveyed to us in real
life." (1) Contrarily, Scolnik's repeated expressionless self-portraits
reveal nothing of her subject - herself. However, it is in the figures'
bodies - their dress, poses, and interactions with one another - that
we find complex narratives of self-examination, of how-it-feels-to-be.
In her early works, Scolnik began her self-investigation with black-and-white
paintings on paper mounted on wood panels. In Self-Portrait as Quadruplets,
for example, four girls - each with Scolnik's face - step forward on a
stage ready to curtsy or dance. There is nothing behind them except a
curtain. Their clothing is that of the late 1950s or early 1960s: shirt-waisted
dresses, bobby socks, and Mary Jane shoes. Despite the title and its implication
of sameness and togetherness, none of the girls seems emotionally linked
to the others; they exist in the same space as if they don't know the
others are there. Devoid of interaction, they merely stare straight ahead
to the implied audience beyond their stage. Similarly, Self-Portrait
as Double Twins presents two sets of twins in a rounded format (as
if in vintage photography) in another stagelike setting. Instead of curtsys,
these girls hold their hands demurely at their waists as if they have
just received communion. That the figures don't engage one another despite
their self-portraiture linkages, amplifies the tension of the unknown
emotions Scolnik implies. She is deliberately ambiguous.
Scolnik's interior spaces are descriptively painted but, claustrophobic
and enclosed, they stop short of seeming like actual places. These spaces
in which she places the repeated imago of self suggest myriad narrative
possibilities. She often paints a scene with an overall palette of one
color such as blue or pink, as in Self-Portrait in Blue Bedroom,
or Self-Portrait in Pink Bedroom. Yet no interior space feels
like a haven for comfort or peace, as the home has often been visualized
in modern advertising and the media. Even the blue, pink, or yellow palette
of some of the paintings creates a brittle rather than comfortable space.
Her larger, latest works are dark and foreboding, revealing more detailed
interior spaces. Yet still, they do not seem like actual interior places
- or safe places - but rather are fictional and capricious. In fact, Scolnik
has slyly painted them to eventually change. By using paint in certain
areas that will wear away and reveal another painting hidden underneath,
she creates a shape-shifting narrative that will outlast her. Mimicking
the arc of a life, the paintings' lives will mutate form and character.
And parallel to the span of a life, the interiors map the light and dark
places that rise and fall within a life.
Scolnik's focus on uncomfortable domesticated interiors articulates their
difference from outside spaces; they may represent the murky inside of
the self. All of Scolnik's narratives in this exhibition are told within
these architectural spaces, playing on the idea of exterior versus interior.
According to architect Adolf Loos, "The exterior of the house …
should resemble a dinner jacket, a male mask; as the unified self, protected
by a seamless façade, the exterior is masculine. The interior is
the scene of sexuality and of reproduction, all the things that would
divide the subject in the outside world." (2) As if self-consciously
acknowledging a gender-based approach, Scolnik's interior spaces, peopled
with herself and herself as others, suggest scenes of feminine relationships
and development - "spaces of femininity." (3) Men rarely appear
in the works and when they do, because they wear Scolnik's face, their
gender seems to be unstable.
Scolnik's exploration of the interrelationships between women and their
various stages of feminine development threads through her body of work.
In Baby, she probes the mother-daughter relationship. The posed
mother and daughter, wearing matching dresses, are echoed in the painting
within the painting that hangs over the mantel. There, rather than posing,
the mother and daughter play and dance together, perhaps suggesting the
child's longing for the maternal body and the mother's longing for the
child. The matching red dresses may be further emblem of the psychoanalytic
desire for access to the maternal body and "to re-experience the
pleasure of fusion with the maternal body" that children may instinctively
crave. (4) In Self-Portrait with Dog, Scolnik's young persona
is a stiff-legged girl, with Scolnik's adult face, standing rigidly in
a room devoid of anything but she and a dog. She sports a minidress and
a beehive hairdo, carries a little purse, and is accompanied by a tiny
dog. Her body is that of a child, not of the woman's face she wears, magnifying
the strained kinship between adult Scolnik and child Scolnik. While her
adult face does not, her tightly squeezed-together child's legs heighten
her vulnerability. By colonizing the child's body, Scolnik may regain
possession of the vulnerable neophyte that she images in this and other
paintings.
Scolnik's paintings that focus on the character Catherine suggest an alternative
path for investigation into self, femininity, and interior spaces. While
painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Scolnik listened to books on
tape, including Wuthering Heights, and books about Catherine the Great,
prompting her to use Catherine (with a variety of spellings) as herself/protagonist.
The myriad spellings—Kathryn, Katrin, Katherine—augment the
enigmatic narratives of self-exploration. For instance in Catherine, the
heavy central figure, Catherine the Great, is also Scolnik with 30 extra
pounds. She is surrounded by an evolving troupe of players that Scolnik
repeats in other paintings. The Sisters was influenced by Scolnik's readings
about Marie Antoinette who, as a 14-year-old girl, was taken from her
parents' Austrian palace for her marriage to France's Louis XVI to form
the Franco-Austrian alliance. According to Scolnik, upon arrival in France,
Marie Antoinette was stripped naked for examination of her body to ensure
that she was "whole." In The Sisters, the young girl
in white panties stands awkwardly on a round coffee table while being
indiscreetly inspected by four women. Of course, all the characters share
the same facial features. Scolnik suggests the girl's intense vulnerability
though her awkward stance, her thin and undeveloped pale body, and her
white, child's panties. The sterile blue living room (fashioned after
1950s decorating magazines Scolnik studied) magnifies the girl's defenselessness
and distress. Like so much powerless chattel, she awaits judgment on her
goods. She does, however, cock up one shoulder in slight defiance. The
girl's undeveloped body-Scolnik underpaints her - discloses her level
of physical and emotional development. Figures who are vague and underdeveloped
- their clothing has less detail, they may only be sketchily painted -
suggest that they are still germinating personas within these narratives.
Scolnik's figures parallel her own development and transitions. Through
these appropriated figures from fiction, history, and her own imagination,
Scolnik investigates the formation of the self and its shifting place
in a continuum that crosses boundaries between time and distance - her
paintings on wood panels refer to other centuries and methods, as do her
characters - and makes connections between the self and others. The unending
search for self implicit in self-portraiture advances through Scolnik's
body of work. Her strategy to understand how the self adapts, or doesn't,
is a way to process the fits and starts of living a productive and contemplative
life.
Dana Self
Curator
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