ALISON SAAR, Flyaway, 2003 Wood and acrylic 40 x 45 x 25 in © Alison Saar Courtesy of LA Louver, Venice, CA Detail below. Photos RA

SCULPTED STORIES OF SENSIBILITY

artworks from –some assemblage required– at California Heritage Museum, 2026

and from LA Louver past exhibitions

by Rosanna Albertini

I will never say “ in my opinion” as everything I say or think is nothing else. Therefore, in my opinion, poets {and artists} operate an essential function because, outside of life or history, they synthesize their meanings with a language of emotions, sensations, intuitions, placed in the infinite space of fantasy. The innermost language we are not able to use. Alberto Albertini 

Alison would say her figures, sculpted or painted, mark the edges of the human experience, bringing us where the spirit is. I have other words on the tip of my pen, like her mind’s power of transformation, mostly working in a pretty unique research field as an artist: the women body.  Alison says that her hands have a mind on their own… oh, words are like the hair quality : straight like spaghetti, curly, thin, they are shaped by what the brain has become in each of us in years of practice, not different from breathing. The heart modulates their voice. It’s probably true that Alison’s hands have also a heart on their own. 

Let’s look at the few early pieces recently revealed by the California Heritage Museum. They were made in the early Eighties. Small, from 8 to 12 inches. Their soul is so palpable that emotions spread out from your entire body as a viewer, even in front of their reproduction. Little hands from my eyes do embrace them.

ALISON SAAR , Untitled, circa 1981-82 10″ x 10.5″ Mixed media Cortesy Trotta – Bono Contemporary Photo RA

ALISON SAAR, The Prize Fight, 1981 8″x 8″ Mixed media and tin Courtesy Trotta – Bono Contemporary Photo RA

ALISON SAAR, King of the 88, 1982 7.5″ x 8″ Mixed media Courtesy of Trotta – Bono Contemporary Photo RA

Thank you Alison non only for making visible and tangible some intense moments of human life, miniature portraits, but also surrounding them with a fragile, ruined, irregular buffer space. Not a frame really, a shapeless landscape still covered with shreds of stories  around the boxing square, the window, the music room. Not the data, the facts, no objectivity. Only art. The artist’s brain, her hands brain shaping, cutting, sewing, painting, assembling the fragility of objects with the energy of her feelings. Every stitch is meaningful, beauty is beyond forms. Beauty is sharing. 

Time has become still in these icons. If there was a past in these tiny lives, it  is absorbed into physical details reassembled by the artist. The girl at the window emerges from layers of found papers and printed flowers, visible and silent.  She  gracefully offers her heart as a flower between her breasts. Locked in herself, she looks in front of her not knowing if hope is painted blue for her in the sculpted space, green on her window frame. Her identity is not necessary. “Creation herself is supposed to allow access to a mystery”. “Time, instead of renewing our states of mind, our qualities, essentially is a new birth”. {Emmanuel Levinas} Which every piece is for this artist. 

It is probably pointless to speculate or linger over the artist’s intentions, her abilities. She is completely taken by the mystery ’s call. 

I’ll try to translate and rewrite here a thought, almost a fantasy written by Emmanuel philosopher, as it gives us a tangible sense, a sense for the mind,  of the deep work Alison Saar has developed through all her life as an artist, recreating the feminine body as a threshold to infinity. 

 The notion of ‘feminine’ breaks free from control, even from the history power that excavated fears and anxiety in women veins, and give them cotton flowers pushing at the end of their hair. She doesn’t run toward the light, light emanates from her. She prefers not to be encountered, hiding the most, converting eros into the power of giving birth. She is the quintessence of alterity.  

{Every arbitrary alteration or mistake is my responsibility, RA} 

ALISON SAAR, Uproot 2023 Wood, ceiling tin, and cotton 32 x 10 x 9 in Courtesy LA Louver. Photo RA On the wall, from far, Hygeia 2022 Found brooms, sea shells, glass bottles, indigo dye, charcoal, and acrylic on found seed sacks, 90 x 80 in

Alison Saar’s artwork symbolizes every woman’s story, her statues show so many different skins, so many colors and textures, they defy gravity, their hair becomes a solid deer antler to protect the head when they are hung upside down, a rope around the ankles. They are solid, monumental, branches push from their bodies as if they were trees. Birds sit on the branches but they don’t sing the woman stories. Maybe Rhiannon Giddens could. 

I wish I could listen to the songs chiseled on their bodies by Alison’s fingers, when branches of milk become roots lifting the body up, toward the ceiling; when a scar reddens the palm of a hand (Scar Song);  when her sculpted figures stand like warriors. Not invulnerable, no, yet they talk and sing to our senses offering  “sensibility, the door to imminence, of always impending change.” {Paul Valéry}

ALISON SAAR, Rouse 2012, Wood, bronze, fiberglass, antler sheds, paper 90 x 76 x 73 in © Alison Saar Photo by Jeff McLane Courtesy LA Louver

They are more trees than dancers. Need a place. Need ground. History indeed wrapped a skein of threads around their ankles, sometimes history is simply daily life growing children: a garden of deer antlers around the feet, for years. Do you remember the day your daughter left for college? When it happened to me, and it was my stepdaughter, I had for some time the sensation I was shorn off of a leg. Rouse, 2012, is a masterpiece. Gertrude Stein would agree.  Can we cry together? 

I don’t know other ways to tell Alison my gratitude. 

ALISON SAAR, Coup de Grace, 2012 Lithograph in four colors, 22 1/8 x 28 1/8 x 2 in © Alison Saar Courtesy LA Louver Photo RA

“Non dirò mai “a mio avviso”perché tutto quello che dico o penso lo è. Dunque, a mio avviso, i poeti svolgono un ruolo essenziale perché, al di fuori della vita e della storia, sintetizzano il significato di queste cose con un linguaggio di emozioni, sensazioni, intuizioni, collocati nello spazio infinito della fantasia. Il linguaggio dell’intimo che noi non sappiamo usare.” AA

When my younger stepdaughter was a child, out of the blue she started a new social practice. Bringing straight forward her little arm, she was offering her hand to each new person she met, saying: “Hi, I am Hannah Kirby 5.”

 Alberto could do the same. “Hi, I am Alberto 99.” Our written conversation and collaboration about the arts is still on. He sent me the four lines I quote here about three weeks ago.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Paul Valéry, The Outlook for Intelligence, Bollinger Series XLV, Princeton University Press, 1989.  

Emmanuel Levinas, Le temps et l’autre,  © Fata Morgana, 1979, PUF 1983

Alison Saar, Of Aether and Earthe, Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, © 2020