Christina Shmigel: sculpture created in response to its environment (02/02/03)

Christina Shmigel: sculpture created in response to its environment

Christina Shmigel's sculpture is often created in response to the place of its making. ... Attention to specific environments and the meditative qualities of repetitive labor are hallmarks of Shmigel's sculpture. The workmanlike quality of her art is not coincidental; she has expressed an attachment to the fire of the welding torch and to the processes of manual construction. Shmigel attended art school, and she also studied welding as a craft. She notes that while craftspeople pay close attention to connections, to the "small moments in sculpture," sculptors tend to be more interested in larger gestures, or "The big idea." Her work unites art with craft and poetry with labor.

- Robin Clark, associate curator of contemporary art, Saint Louis Museum of Art.

ST. LOUIS, Mo. - Christina Shmigel's installation "The Logic of Attachment" - forged and fabricated steel, steel pipe, and plumbing fixtures - opened at the Saint Louis Art Museum as part of a series of exhibitions featuring the work of contemporary artists. Titled "Currents 87: Christina Shmigel," the exhibit, which opened on December 6, 2002, is on view through February 16.

Ms. Shmigel's work over the years developed from individual and discrete sculptures into the conceptual framework of interrelationships between pieces that depend upon their surrounding. Her current installation at the Saint Louis Art Museum sets the formal museum interior in dialogue with aspects of the psychological and physical landscape of St. Louis.

The sculptor, who learned blacksmithing in the 1990s, works with plumbing parts and forged elements. Her background in welding contributes to the workmanlike quality of her art. In the installation, all the tank forms are forged and fabricated; the plumbing parts are incorporated into the work as a sensible way to make larger pieces that disassemble. She also points out and enjoys the reference in these parts - referred to as elbows, nipples, couplings - to our bodies.

The installation is informed by the landscape of St. Louis in that the city, as noted by the artist, has "an unusual variety of industrial structures because of its history as a manufacturing city, and a lot of these forms are now antiquated..." supplying, in terms of urban archaeology, "evidence of what came before."

During a gallery talk/interview with curator Robin Clark, Ms. Shmigel defined the relation of her work to the beaux-art interior of the museum, noting that "the connection was in beauty."

"What interests me is the beauty of what is ordinary and pragmatic and easily overlooked. I think it was Le Corbusier who said, 'grain elevators are the cathedrals of America.' This kind of beauty is unsettling in a museum setting," she said.

In her gallery talk Ms. Shmigel noted that her work has "shifted from discrete objects to pieces that depended upon their surroundings, with the sculptures including the space around them as part of themselves." This idea evolved, apart from an interest in the steel forms themselves, as a means of "energizing the space, in how the viewer moves amongst the objects."

While paying attention to specific environments, Ms. Shmigel's work has a deeply meditative quality. In speaking of the various levels of meaning in her work, the sculptor noted that "there's always a sense of longing that I am addressing. Not so much a yearning for the past, but a sense that things get lost and it is their absence that lingers."

She goes on to say that "the duality of isolation and belonging is very much at the core of [her] my work. Some of this comes, I think, from growing up with parents who were exiles - what was left behind was much more real to them than what was present. The work also has this displacement: it appears to be about plumbing, but it's real subject matter hovers in the air. It's something about our conflicting desire for separateness and connection."

In his review of Ms. Shmigel's work St. Louis Post-Dispatc, critic Jeff Daniel wrote, "[This] talented sculptor is a conceptualist of the best sort. She not only knows how to work her mind, she knows how to get her hands dirty." She brings to life the heritage of remaining structures of the industrial era. She turns the mundane and usual into what Mr. Daniel refers to "as a reminder to preserve this heritage via her own updated interpretation." He goes on to propose that "her goal is much larger, one that goes well beyond the metal cones and iron pipes on display here. She seems to be taking up the call of John Cage, the late composer, who espoused the theory that anything and everything could be music."

Ivy Cooper, writing for the Riverfront Times in St. Louis, contrasts Ms. Shmigel's current installation with "Joplin," Richard Serra's steel construction. Ms. Cooper notes that Ms. Shmigel's work never ignores its surroundings; it carries on a conversation with the two large Anselm Kiefer works visible in the adjoining galleries.

The critic concludes: " 'The Logic of Attachment' wants to tell us something about the past and the present, attachment and loss, and how we see the built environment. We'll all be better off if we listen."

When asked how she sees her work in relation to the tradition of modernist welded sculpture practiced by artists like Picasso, Julio Gonzalez and David Smith, Ms. Shmigel noted that "there is something in the weight of all that work that is too 'masculine' for me. I am much more interested in African metal work, particularly that of the Dogon people in Mali."

Ms. Shmigel's interest in African metal work has taken her on extensive travels in Africa - to Mali, Ivory Coast, Niger and Nigeria - a continent where, she observes," smiths are perceived as nearly shamanistic in their power, so they are both respected and feared."

* * *

Christina Shmigel is assistant professor of sculpture at Webster University in St. Louis. She studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and received an MFA in sculpture from Brooklyn College and an MFA in metalsmithing from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

A native New Yorker, Ms. Shmigel grew up in New York's Ukrainian community, where she was a member of the Ukrainian American Youth Association (SUM) and attended the School of Ukrainian Studies of the Self Reliance Society. Her first solo art exhibition was at the Ukrainian Artists' Association in New York. Ms. Shmigel is also a member of the Ukrainian National Association Branch 194.

Among the artist's recent selected solo exhibitions are: "Henry's Plumbing," Hunt Gallery, Webster University, St. Louis (2001); "Tipple: Constructions in Steel," Bonsack Gallery, St. Louis (2000); and "Midnight Train," Thomas K. Lang Gallery, Vienna, Austria (1999).

Among her recent selected group exhibitions are: "Ancient Futures," Nova Scotia Center for Craft and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia (2001); "Ironing," National Ornamental Metals Museum, Memphis, Tenn. (2000); Kunst in der Landschaft, GutGasteil Gallery, Gasteil, Austria (1999); "Bottomland," in collaboration with the poet Richard Newman and the photographer John Hilgert, Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis, Mo., (1998); and "Women of Iron," Ashevill Art Museum, North Carolina (1998).

For a project outside of Seoul, South Korea, as part of an International Environmental Art Symposium (2000), Ms. Shmigel was offered a site near a lake that had been formed by the flooding of an ancient village. For "What Lies Beneath," Ms. Shmigel carried rocks up a steep embankment to build a stone house that was sealed except for a small niche, and there she hung reeds lined with gold leaf from tree branches to create a shimmering, ephemeral canopy. The piece was built in such a way that it would slowly erode and return to the earth.

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