Mary Gillis: Studio Views

This past February I was asked to write an introduction for an exhibition at Gladden Space, a new gallery in Lansing, of work by the artist Mary Gillis. I first met Mary many years ago when she had a studio near my house in Royal Oak. I acquired a work on paper of Mary's for my office when I was a corporate guy. (The other piece was a print by Richard Serra.) The director of the gallery, Ian Stallings, is a pretty interesting guy, a transplant mostly recently from San Francisco where he had been doing high-end design work and repping artists, as well as creating artworks of his own. It turns out I had met Ian a few months previous at the 10th anniversary gala for the Broad Museum at Michigan State University where he serves as a board member. All-in-all it was a good experience and I am especially happy with how the essay turned out.

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The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his famous study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, distinguishes between what he terms the “front stage” and the “backstage” of our social interactions. The front stage is where we consciously present ourselves to others, especially in our formal, public relationships. The backstage is the zone of the more personal, a place where we may, among other things, prepare for our front stage presentations. A gallery exhibition is a front stage: the work on view has been curated from a larger set of objects and installed to represent a particular point of view, be it to show a unified body of work, the evolution of a process or idea, or an artist’s development over time. "Mary Gillis: Studio Views" gives us a rare glimpse into all of this. The studio is an artist’s backstage, the place where ideas and processes incubate and develop and ultimately take shape in works of art that are intended enter the public domain. A visit to Mary Gillis’s studio offers an opportunity to glimpse the backstage of her creative process. 

Her current studio located on the second floor of an older brick building in a light industrial area south of downtown Lansing with a view of a bend in the Grand River. It is divided into several smaller spaces, some having different elevations. Works from various series, from different periods, and in various stages of completion can be found within proximity of one another. Some of the space is devoted to production, some to storage, and some where Gillis is working out how to present certain works when they are to be exhibited or enter a collection. Amidst the diversity of materials, scale and subject there is a sense of a dialog of elements feeding off one another and thereby informing Mary’s ongoing creative practice. 

In the catalog to a 2018 exhibition entitled, "Metalscapes," at K.OSS Contemporary Art in Detroit, Gillis notes: “My work historically shows a balance of movement versus stasis.” Juxtapositions permeate Mary’s work, between the loose brush work contained within geometrical forms, between abstract and more representational imagery, between paintings and sculptures that combine manufactured elements with expressive handwork. 

True to her penchant for experimentation with various media, in 2016 Mary began using recycled highway guardrail. This unexpected material offered a pronounced sculptural element and with-it surprising opportunities and references. 

In contrast to the exposed brick of much of Mary’s studio is a pristine white wall upon which is a new series that harkens back to the late 1970s when she lived and worked in Venice. The original works were large drawings made by building up layers of pastel and then removing the pigment with an eraser to create skeins of calligraphic gestures. 

“The Venice series of drawings on paper, were influenced by the movement of the surrounding waters of Venice, and the exuberance of my 25-year-old self-discovery in the luxury of a studio in the Palazzo Grassi situated on the Grand Canal. The drawings evolved into works on canvas, later exhibited at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York.” – Mary Gillis.

The current iteration reproduces the imagery on aluminum panels, where we see her original gestures on a high-tech substrate, the personal touch with the manufactured product. 

Blue is an important presence in Mary’s palette, especially in the recent “441” paintings but also across many of other works. On one level, this reflects the environment in which Mary works, with the Grand River within eyeshot of her studio, but also the Great Lakes which have such a major impact on our local consciousness. On another level, the fluid brushwork in the paintings, contained as they are in horizontal bands, registers a broader recognition of the nature/culture divide, juxtaposing the desire to impose order on seeming chaos, both physically and expressively, concerns that have long occupied the artist. 

An almond-shaped image is found in many of Gillis’s works. This image is often associated with the intersection of overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. The image actually dates back at least two millennia to Euclidean geometry, and perhaps even earlier to Pythagoras, where it is known as the ichthys (fish) or in Latin the vesica piscus (fish bladder). (Turned sideways the ichthys is also the “Jesus fish” icon that emerged in the 1970s in charismatic Christianity.) Other associations read the symbol as the dividing cell, the process of one becoming two and the opening through which the lifeworld comes into being. While not necessarily a conscientious reference to these associations, the form resonates along similar lines in Mary’s work that signal emergence, such as the paintings titled Breaking Through and Amphibious.

The form is also evoked in the form of the Valais blacknose sheep that occupies the center of the Mary’s most recent painting Juliet Goes to Italy. Juliet appears isolated on an expanse of ground suggesting the ancient walls of Italy, warm in the undertones and textured with age. The lamb is a favorite image to Mary and she deliberated for months about placing Juliet center stage. 

With this exhibition, a portion of Gillis’s work leaves the backstage of the studio to enter the front stage of the gallery. For the moment, the artist’s work is done. It’s now the public’s turn to take up the conversation.