María Elena González: TEMPO

María Elena González, a sculptor who works across the mediums of drawing, print making, music, video, and performance, has always been interested in nature as a subject in her art. She has been equally interested in sound, and as noted more recently, in music. The Tree Talk series in this exhibition has evolved in amazing ways for more than ten years, and is among the most significant bodies in the artist’s creative production. Drawing on her passion for architecture, sound, music, and nature’s elements, González discovered the ways and means of devising unusual concepts to make two- and three-dimensional work from birch trees. How did it all begin?

During summer mornings in 2005 when González was a resident faculty member at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, she routinely drank her early morning coffee in one of two chairs by Lake Wesserunsett on the school’s property, surrounded by trees. On one of those mornings, in a moment of contemplation, she realized the visual parallels between a birch tree and a cylindrical player piano roll. With that thought in mind, the artist wondered how, if at all, she could hear the sound of a birch tree on a player piano. Before the residency ended, González peeled off the bark of one of the felled trees and sent it back to her Brooklyn studio.

For the next several years, the artist worked on multiple projects at once because what thrills her about making art is finding her way to something new. (In conversation, June 2015) While developing a body of work completely unrelated to the birch tree, she was also grappling with the ideas that had caught her attention at Skowhegan. Her way forward with the birch tree began by creating works on paper. These enabled her to become familiar with the bark, its form and feel, and its markings – known botanically as lenticels and which enable the tree to breathe.The artist figured out how to get the markings from a tree onto paper for a player piano, by having the paper laser cut. By 2012, she resolved many objectives when creating Skowhegan Birch #1 (2012), the first player piano roll. González created a visual language to use the bark as landscape itself, and to place the markings of the bark onto paper so the sounds of nature would be heard.

Bark Framed #2 (2012) is among the earliest works to use the actual bark from the birch tree.The composition of the different pieces of bark, including numbers, becomes a botanical map, different than, perhaps, others we are familiar with. T2 5-8 (2015) is a delicate rubbing with collage elements.The overall form may be likened to an unidentified geographical area such as a county, state, or country. The green vellum precisely placed on three different parts of the rubbing further enhances the presence of the tree’s markings. It could also be interpreted as highlighting the surfaces or positions of territorial areas.

Over the years, González returned to Skowhegan several times to gather other fallen trees and wood for ongoing work. T2 5-8 came from the second tree where her system of columns, numbers, and rows may remind us of a system of numbers and letters in Hanne Darboven’s musical works, in which the artist devised a method for transferring the structure of her date calculations into musical notes. Specific, or even general territorial associations reside in the viewer’s imagination.

T2 #2 1-55 (2015), the semi-circular forty-five-foot graphite rubbing with ink jet on vellum and collaged elements on Japanese paper, is the eponymous work on a grand scale. Delicate in execution, the graphite rubbing evokes a scenic view of nature on a misty day. And while the atmosphere is different in Aaron Siskind’s photographic series of peeling tree barks, interesting visual parallels come to mind. Where exactly is landscape? What do we know about it? T2 #2 1-55 conveys an aura of mystery.

Skowhegan Birch #1 and Skowhegan Birch #2 (2014), with their distinctive bark patterns, produce individual sculpture-musical compositions for the two player piano rolls. When played, each has an unexpected “score” whereby the phrasing, polyphony, and rhythm seem deliberately rather than randomly composed. John Cage or Steve Reich’s music comes to mind. However the sounds resonate with the viewer, the music literally comes from the trees.[1]

When the artist concludes the Tree Talk series with Skowhegan Birch #3, she will have three compositions for the player piano transcribed into sheet music to be played simultaneously by pianists on six standard pianos in concert. The audio will sound like a forest.

Another major exhibition highlight is Tempo (2015), whose video component the artist shot on a return trip to Skowhegan to film Lake Wesserunsett, thereby identifying the site that inspired the Tree Talk series. González made the two miniature chairs out of birch from the area, exactly like the ones she sat in. They are placed at a specific distance from the projector so that their shadows are to scale next to the trees in the projection.

Sound, which eventually became music, has been central to much of González’ work since the late 1980s.The early furniture-object-sculpture, T for Two (1989), in the shape of a small stepladder with rawhide inserts, was conceived so that two people could tap a beat on the drum-like top. Pod and Mambo Mango (both, 1991) have sound and were placed on the floor to also be played like drums. Black Bean Rain Sticks (1992), inspired by rain sticks, are objects in the shape of long, hollow tubes containing small black beans. When turned upside down, they make a sound similar to rushing water or rain. In form and concept, these are small percussion instruments.[2]

New works such as Clave, Spread–Roll, and Chromatic Scale (all, 2016) also refer to music. Clave, two cast piano rolls, refers to a basic beat in Cuban music: 1-2, pause; 1-2-3, pause; 1-2, pause, 1-2-3. The clave originated in sub-Saharan African musical traditions where it survives in Cuba, the artist’s country of birth. So the sculptures, similar to others, reference her Cuban origins. Spread–Roll, an exquisite drawing, features a photographic image of a player piano roll and its shadows, elements related to the shadows of the two small chairs as well as the player piano roll as object. Its collaged three-dimensional element, created on the left side is rolled with cut-outs as in a piano roll. The artist noted that Spread-Roll goes from the depiction of a flat image to the actualization of the object on paper. The drawing Chromatic Scale features eight player piano rolls and a rubbing of a chromatic pitch key. Together the images further explore the artist’s interests in combining sound and objects. The chromatic scale for different musical instruments, including a piano and a xylophone, refers to the half tones of an octave in either ascending or de- scending order. In this drawing, the colors progress, as in music, in tonalities from white to black. These works, together with others in the exhibition such as the sculpture Xylophone (2017), embody the extraordinary process of searching, finding, and discovering the brilliant resolution of the thematic and material range so evident in the artist’s practice.

For the purposes of this discussion, we end with Turn I (2016), one of several new sculptures. After working with sound for the piano pieces, the artist wanted to return to the object where the markings would now appear in the form of a tree trunk, i.e. another cylindrical shape.The markings on the wood together with its small size remind one of a tree stump, similar to one you would come across in a walk through a wooded landscape.

—JULIA P. HERZBERG, Ph.D.

NOTES

1. The video of Skowhegan Birch #1 was played by a pianolist in a special performance before the opening of the exhibition Against the Grain: Wood in Contemporary Art, Craft and Design at the Museum of Art and Design, New York, in 2013. The video was included at the 30th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia that same year. Skowhegan Birch #I was performed at the opening of the artist’s solo exhibition María Elena González:Tree Talk Series at the 31st Biennial in 2015, curated by Božidar Zrinski.

2. See Julia P. Herzberg, “A Conversation with María Elena González: A Trajectory of Sound,” in María Elena González:Tree Talk Series, exhib. cat. (Ljubljana, Slovenia: International Center for Graphic Arts, 2016), pp. 42 – 51.

“Maria Elena González ” was published in the exhibition catalogue Tempo. New York: Hirschl & Adler Modern, 2017.
Courtesy of Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York / Photography © John Wilson White / Design by Elizabeth Finger
Artwork © Maria Elena Gonzalez