Essay on the Art Works of Louise Kames
By Lenore Metrick
Art engages us through vision and through thought. In art, sense perception can become the means to ideas; vision provides a springboard to thought. We experience this in the artwork of Louise Kames. In Kames's art, familiar objects lead the viewer to a place of contemplation outside of familiar appearance. Merleau-Ponty articulates this in 'Eye and Mind', marveling how painting " gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible". We don't simply view Kames works, we participate with them, because her sustaining gaze becomes retraced in our own looking.
Kames chooses objects deliberately. Her installations involve commonplace objects with simple, essentially iconic, shapes. Nothing could be more basic in form, nor more mundane, than ironing boards, and four of these comprise "Elegy for Ellen". Similarly, the seven identical bird feeders in 'Ache For Home', are each shaped like a small rudimentary house. Her installations rely on retaining the normative meaning of the object. Kames desires our initial art encounter to be with prosaic objects, allowing a dialogue to open effortlessly. From there, we begin to notice contrasts, the alterations that transform the objects and remove them from the commonplace: ironing boards decked in gold leaf, bird feeders filled with buttons, surgical gloves, a feather. By movingmundane objects into the realm of memorial and recollection, she opens up a world of associative meanings. We no longer confine the objects to the momentary, but now recognize their relationship to
eternal time.
All Kames's art works comparably alter our perception of time. Her drawings invite prolonged meditation. With subdued palette of gray charcoal and washes, Kames renders plant parts: husks, roots, seed pods, leaves. Her touch mirrors her gaze: steady and unwavering but gentle as if to not damage the slightest leaf, or alter the placement of a branch.Dried, withered, at times almost fetishistic, each object is drawn as meticulously and as isolated as a laboratory specimen. But Kames intention is not to duplicate appearances of familiar objects, but to depict the intense quiet of her absorption. These are not technical drawings because her unwavering focus becomes part of the representation. It fuses with the object being drawn, almost making it vibrate. Her images resist being fixed on the page. They hover in front of us, weightless. As in levitation, their mass momentarily defies earth's usual gravity, energized instead by an internal magnetic field. Kames's vision has suspended the cabbage, centrifuged the laurel leaves, and it is activated by our gaze.
The plants she depicts share a place in the cycle of things: they reached
their peak long ago and passed it. The cabbage has already begun to rot, the leaves in 'Crown' are brown and beginning to wither. 'Triad's seed pods have dried; in 'Unearthed' roots are removed, pulled from their sustaining soil. Kames has isolated each in its transition from fecundity to decomposition. She stops the process at a point just where it progresses headlong into decay and suspends it there. Her interest lies in the entire gamut: not just generation but degeneration and, by extension, regeneration. Her titles support this vision: 'Transplant'. 'Reclaim', 'Reveal'. Her work stops time to affirm a juncture between temporality and eternity.
Louise Kames is a BVM sister which often gives viewers specific expectations regarding her work. Those looking only for conventionalized religious depictions will not find them. Yet following a direction of modern art since Millet and Van Gogh, without religious symbols and without doctrine Kames's art parallels religious concerns. Her pictures seem visible fragments of a larger, unseen, reality. Kames's art creates a stillness for confronting issues of permanence and decay and time. Those anticipating religious concerns may initially be surprised but upon reflection find they are not disappointed.From the catalog, Visible Fragments, 2000
The Blanden Memorial Art Museum
Fort Dodge, Iowa