Gallery in the Field

CONVERSATION: B. Amore, artist, and Fran Bull, Gallery Director

September 2008

FRAN BULL: What is the overarching theme of this exhibition--?

B. AMORE: Interesting . . . even at this point the "theme" of the show is still evolving. I've been working on the gloves, which are all found objects, picked up off the street in New York, Singapore, Boston, Vermont and preserved in their original form. I go through great effort to keep the shape, and engage in quite an arduous process of preservation and casting them with bronze resin. They are always much more time-consuming than I think that they will be. These found objects, combined with pieces utilizing the "found” faces that I have photographed on some of the same streets form the core of the exhibit. I guess that you would say that I'm really interested in giving a voice to people and objects that are usually not "noted" in any way.

FRAN BULL: I am assuming you refer in part to the tools and work gear worn by people who perform work with their hands, and that this work shapes the objects in a particular way that may be observed by others in an exhibition setting,and appreciated.

In calling attention to the protective gloves, to the way time and use have altered them, you expand, in a sense, the notion of what may be viewed as beautiful. The glove becomes an aesthetic object, shaped first by its wearer, and then by you.

B. AMORE: The gloves that I find are of all sorts. Some are work gloves, and these are always of particular interest to me, probably because of all of my years of stone carving, and watching my own gloves become transformed by the processes in which I am engaged. Some belong to individuals who are wearing them to “keep warm.” Recently, one glove that I finished had been mended in several places with very detailed stitchery. Someone picking it up in a show said, “How sad – to think of how much work went into mending this, and then to lose it!”

Some gloves are gleaned from friends. One friend gave me a quantity of gloves – all left hands! She said the right hand ones had been worn out and discarded. In fact, the more worn the gloves, the more interesting to me. I love the sense of history with which the object is imbued, precisely because of the way that it has been used, over and over again, by the same hand. Each hand, like each person, has its own particular characteristics. Often, when someone donates their own gloves, they are not that aware of the particularity. One pair, from a sculptor, had the smallest finger of one glove pressed into the ring finger next to it. When I commented on it, the he said that it was because his finger had been broken, and that was the only way that he could hold the tool.

I think for all of us, there are parts of our history, that are so “automatic,” so familiar, that we “forget” them. The object, preserved, reminds us of our history.

FRAN BULL: What, in your thinking, have the owners of these gloves not been able to express, historically, and what do you imagine might be gleaned by visitors to your installations with regard to the unheard voices? What are these voices wishing to say?

B. AMORE: I think of the majority of gloves with which I work, which belong to complete strangers. I have a friend on Long Island, and he has donated many laborers’ gloves to the collection. These have always fascinated me the most, probably because I didn’t find them – and I have no context for them. Often, when I find a glove myself, I retain the “picture” of where it was on the sidewalk, on the street, under a car, etc. These gloves from my friend, Fred Gardaphe, speak to me of so much toil, really hard labor. They are worn, “consummato” in Italian, which literally means “consumed.” They make me think of lives “consumed” by the daily, continuous labor of working people. I grew up in a working class neighborhood, East Boston, and I remember always studying people’s hands, even on the subway when I went to high school. Hands and faces seemed the parts of the body that were “exposed” – not covered with clothing. I would always make up stories about the people that I observed, using the “clues” present in their facial expressions, and the shapes of their hands.

My hope, of course, is that visitors will pick up the gloves. Despite the transformation from cloth and leather into bronze- impregnated resin, the gloves definitely retain much of their original gesture and character. My intervention has been to preserve them in as close to their original nature as possible, but also to transform them into a work of art. Bronze, always a very prestigious material, seems an unlikely material to use, but in a way, it is both humorous and touching to choose bronze as the medium. There’s something about taking a common object, either lost or discarded, and elevating it to a work of art, truly transforming it, while honoring the life that produced it.

When I patina each glove, the transformation is both striking and mysterious. Patina is akin to glazing in ceramics, in that one never really knows the final result until the process is complete, and the artist cannot have complete control over it. The end result is often a surprise. My hope is that in viewing the gloves, and having a direct experience of picking them up and turning them over, the viewers to the exhibition will come up with their own stories. I think that it’s really impossible not to be moved by the humanity still inherent in the object. I’ve even thought of having a place for folks to write down the “stories” that come up when they experience the gloves. For me, having people interact with the work is very important, whether it is recorded or not. I appreciate it enormously when people share their impressions with me, because then I feel that the circle of communication is complete.

Sometimes, I work with gloves “on commission.” People have become very attached to their own gloves, or to the one that is left when one has been lost. A poet friend sent me one absolutely exquisite glove, Italian leather, with an extraordinary design in red leather on black. She had lost its mate, and had never been able to part with this one. I suggested that she write a poem about it, and that we make a small “shrine” of the glove in an ornate frame, with her poem as a backdrop. In a way, the transformation of both the feeling and the object can provide a sort of healing.

FRAN BULL: This already is quite a complete statement, but I know you also want to comment on the other parts of your show, the faces you have included, along with bits of silk and silk flowers and tin ceiling materials, etc.

My own sense is that your art is a kind of homage to whole populations, to people whose lives are quietly heroic and therefore largely unsung. I am thinking of a woman I know who, essentially, walked on foot out of Ecuador and somehow made it to the United States. Her goal was to find work in this country and send money back home to her mother, brothers and son.

She succeeded in doing just this over many years, and eventually she purchased a house for her mother, and her son went to law school. In the meanwhile, she became a US citizen and has made a life here. She remains very poor, and yet she is grateful for the life she has, which is the life of a factory worker. I know this is a story multiplied over and over, and this saga is a large part of the American story. If you made the story into a film, it would be as gripping as any story ever written about or filmed.

Can you speak about the content in the work, the faces transferred to bits of silk, like petals. What story are you telling with this work? Who are those people?

B. AMORE: These people are nameless, anonymous, except for being caught for a moment by the attention of my gaze, of my camera’s gaze. They are the folks we see every day on the street, all over the world. I think that the inception for this work was in 2004, when I was invited to do a show for the Godwin Ternbach Museum at Queens College. The curator was familiar with the work that I had done on Italian immigration at Ellis Island - Life line-filo della vita.

When I visited Queens College, I was struck by the enormous diversity of the students there –over fifty-nine different ethnic groups represented. The title of the exhibit was called Memory and History, and I knew that I wanted every person who walked into that show to find a reflection of themselves that they could relate to. I settled on the idea of the 2” x 2” squares of silk and I combed through old history books, photo books and “pulled” out faces from crowds, from very general photographs, and printed them individually on the squares of silk. I specifically avoided anybody famous, or any well known photographs. I was also afraid of copyright issues, so I used older sources.

The size of the squares related to the shapes on the worn tin panels that I used as backdrops. As I worked on this project over the period of a year, I would write in my journal during studio sessions. The process was, and is, an excruciating one, in a sense – so many details, from the finding of the faces, to the shredding of the silk, to the printing, to the affixing of the image. I started out as a stone carver, and this work often feels akin to carving – each small stroke, or element, leading to creation of the whole. I had intended to use text from Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the quintessential texts of the human journey, but in the end, I decided to go with the writings that had come spontaneously from my immersion in the process of looking into the eyes of these “lost” lives, their queries, their joys, their pains.

FRAN BULL: Can you speak about the means you employ as an artist to create your "scenarios?” The photography, the other materials you combine in unusual combinations. These are a kind of assemblage, and bring to mind the likes of Rauschenberg, and people like Nancy Spero and even Joseph Cornell. You invoke a world. What is that world?

B. AMORE: The first thing that comes to mind, of course, is the physical and technical means – but quickly after that, comes the sense of inner question that really gives rise to the work. Who are we? What are we doing here? Do our lives have any meaning beyond our small selves? Are we a part of history, even if we lead unmarked lives? I guess these

are the existential questions that pervade our lives whether we are conscious of them or not.

Even during the creation of the Memory and History show, I was impatient to be making my own photographs, but I really didn’t have time to get into that. As soon as the show was up, I began photographing on the streets in New York. It was during the time of the Christo installation in Central Park. I had experimented while traveling, with my small video camera, in airports and crowded places in Rome, Paris. Finally I settled on a very compact swivel-type digital camera, one that I could hold at a very low angle so that passers-by would not know that they were being photographed.

Rather than trying for portrait shots, I would almost photograph at random. Crowds are the best, because then no one notices. The most interesting thing for me has been to see the variety of expressions on people’s faces, just as they are walking across a street. Some people look worried, some ecstatic. The expressions become more apparent to me as I work with the photographs. When I’m shooting on the street, I hardly have time to reflect, I’m in the flow of the moment, constantly bombarded with the visual information, constantly moved, but constantly reminded of the fact that I have to shoot quickly if I’m to catch what I’m there to catch! Later, as I gaze into the eyes of these strangers, I’m often just “stopped” by the gaze, by the story behind the gaze, by the sense of our commonly shared human condition. That is what I hope to convey, really, the sense of us being one family, not very different one from the other. We are so totally and vulnerably human, and we create such barriers sometimes.

When I was making the “Stepping Stones” panels for the Memory and History show, the Iraq war was breaking out. I was tremendously upset. Every time I looked into one of those tiny faces that I was printing, that I was arranging, I was struck by our relationship to one another, struck by the inhumanity of taking another person’s life, struck by how we all hurt, how we all need love. We all despair. We all hope.

Oh, you asked about assemblage, Rauschenberg, Cornell – You hit the nail on the head. Rauschenberg is one of my favorite artists. I loved him even when I was a “purist” marble carver! His love of the world, all aspects of the world, in an omnivorous way, has always been an inspiration. After I mastered the rudiments of stone carving, I was impatient for fuller expression. I met Mark De Suvero, and began making combinations of found steel and stone. This allowed me to begin to “play” more. To bring together disparate materials into a kind of balance, seemed more like what my life was like, what life is like in general. We all have the same challenge, really, to create a whole out of the parts of our lives. I love the “found object.” The more worn, creased and worked over by life – the better. Using the found gloves is really just an extension of the found steel. Now, I’m even using sculptural shapes made of discarded and “street-processed” paper, as well as other bits of flotsam and jetsam that the street provides so generously.

FRAN BULL: Is there an implied political aspect to the work? Are you lobbying for the people you have chosen to represent? If they and their lives are without voice, how would you speak for them?

B. AMORE: You know, I was quite surprised when a gallery owner friend from New York came to the Memory and History show and said “Your work is quite political.” I honestly had never thought of the work as overtly political. I think that my own consciousness of that has been evolving along with the work. You know that I was involved, as a child, in a sea of immigrants through the work that my mother was doing with Displaced Persons after the Second World War. This made a very deep and lasting impression on me, and influenced my subsequent life in social work.

I think that, through hearing my mother’s stories, seeing her tears as she related her encounters with women who had come from the concentration camps, meeting people when I was very young, who had lost entire families in the camps, that something shifted within me, a sense of how tenuous and how resilient life is, how it can change so quickly, and how much injustice there seemed to be. No one was deserving of that much pain. Those early experiences imprinted my life, and my mother’s generosity of spirit, her acceptance and love of all of those individuals, formed the core of my own love and fascination with our essential interconnectedness.

FRAN BULL: As sociology, can you say something about the immigrant experience and how it has evolved in today's world? Does the art address current issues such as immigration law, assimilation, sub-cultures and their sense of belonging to the larger culture?

B. AMORE: Ah, back to politics again! My working class, college-educated dad was always talking politics, philosophy, religion at the dinner table. It was always the “haves” and the “have nots.” It brings tears to my eyes, now, really, when I think of my parents, their experiences, the deep, lived questions of their lives, and the effect on me. When I was making the “Stepping Stones” panels for the Memory and History show, I felt that we were all immigrants, all on the same journey. The theme of journey has been a consistent one in my work, ever since the beginning. Rather than saying that my work is overtly “political,” I would say that it is deeply human, and to be deeply human is to be concerned about our fellow and sister human beings. And if we are deeply concerned, there is no way that we cannot reach out, in some way, to people in need. And there’s lots of need, that’s for sure.

I’ve made a first-time installation here at Gallery in the Field, of the “Stepping Stones” panels, where they are stacked, one atop another instead of in a linear fashion around the room. They work both ways, but there is something about seeing the mass of them, the mass of the faces together that hopefully will bring the viewer into more of a sense of contact with being part of the whole human family.

It has now gotten easier, or more difficult, depending on circumstance, for people to traverse large distances. Immigration is happening at an incredible pace, if you think about it, and it is a global phenomenon. It is truly astonishing to me, that we haven’t learned the lessons of the past, that present day immigrants are often treated in the same ways, or worse, than in the past. Just read Kiran Desai’s novel, The Inheritance of Loss, symbolic of a whole spate of current literature dealing with the immigrant experience. I think that the more we are aware of the fact that the “other” is, in essence, not very different than ourselves, the more we will vote for more humane laws, the more we will find peaceful ways to live together, or at least be engaged in a more thoughtful process of how to do this, day to day.

My next project has to do with the Mexican migrant workers on our own farms, here in Vermont. I’m calling it Invisible Odysseys because of the secret nature of so many of their journeys. I guess that this is more overtly political and I feel that I have to tread a fine line between telling their stories and honoring their often precarious presence in this country.

FRAN BULL: Are there ways art and art making can influence events in the larger culture? Can an art such as your own, an art concerned with people and their lives and their struggles, have an impact in such a way as to make a difference? I guess what I am interested in is your sense of the ability of art to influence events--perhaps for the better.

B. AMORE: Well, I certainly hope so! I don’t feel like a crusader, but my hope is that through having a direct experience of the work, that the viewer will be more in touch with his/her own humanity, and the more we are able to feel our own vulnerability, the more generous and accepting we can be of others. It’s a constant struggle, let’s face it - each of us, with our own natures, making peace even within ourselves, let alone with others.

I think that you asked earlier about the use of the silk flower petals. At first, I was drawn to the color. I didn’t feel attached to the fact of the flower, per se, but rather to the sculptural quality of the deconstructed flower. The petals are like the faces, the mass of individual pieces creating a whole. The flowers are delicate; they are soft; they evoke tender feelings. Flowers are often used in memorials, where we are moved in ways that we generally defend against.

The gloves, all discarded, lost, re-found, re-newed, are all so human in their gestures, as they reach out to us, allowing an instant of recognition of our common plight as pilgrims in this life time. We lose ourselves. We find ourselves. Renewal is possible. I think that only through recognizing that we are all part of the human condition, that we are not so different, you and I - that we can begin to make a difference.

The Boston Sculptors Gallery is pleased to present Street Calligraphies by sculptor and writer, B. Amore, née Bernadette D’Amore. Her work has evolved from its origins in carved forms to complex installations involving text, ancestral artifacts, alternative photo processes, stone, fabric, and objets trouvés. Her installations and assemblages often appear to be meditations on the layered nature of existence. They are sculptural ruminations which bridge the past and the present.

Diminutive portraits printed on silk are interwoven with salvaged ceiling tin, stone and text to create the wall installation, Stepping Stones, which speaks to the ancient tradition of leaving home in search of a new world, a journey we now call immigration. The random photographs were taken by Amore on street corners in cities around the world and graphically demonstrate the increasingly heterogeneous nature of our evolving societies.

In Amore’s work, experimentation and innovation are in constant interplay. Her work is literally the “stuff” of life. Rather than being highly finished in a traditional fashion, the stone is incorporated as puzzle-pieces which have been reconfigured. Faces of strangers become anonymous transient characters in the pieces, and yet each visage has the potential power to arrest the viewer’s gaze. In her newest series, Street Calligraphies, found gloves which have been cold cast in bronze, still evoke the mysterious presence of the lost owner. Although the gloves always retain their original gesture, they are combined with other enigmatic elements from city streets and transformed through the artistic process into works of art.

B. Amore is an artist, educator and writer. She studied at Boston University, University of Rome, Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara and is the recipient of Massachusetts Cultural grants, a Fulbright Grant, Mellon Fellowship as well as a Citation of Merit Award presented by the Vermont Arts Council. She is founder of the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center in Vermont. Amore taught for many years at the Boston Museum School and has won numerous public art commissions in both the USA and Japan and is represented by SOHO 20 Gallery, New York and Boston Sculptors Gallery, Boston. Life line – filo della vita, her multimedia exhibit, that premiered at the Ellis Island Museum, is now in book form. Her most recent project and book, Invisible Odysseys, is the result of working with Mexican migrant farmworkers in Vermont. Her sculptural environment, Chelsea Creek Clipper, a permanent public art piece of twenty-nine sea wall stones, was supported by the Edward Ingersoll Browne Fund and can be seen at the Condor Street Urban Wild Park in East Boston.