Photos Jack Ramsdale.
Top (detail) and bottom:
S h a d o w jie ld C ry s ta l,
2009,
stainless steel, Lucite balls,
24x24x3!^ in.
cloth’s parameter. Equally inspirational
have been an appreciation of the medium’s
structural and architectural potential from
reading Anni Albers’s
On Designing
as a stu-
dent and the childhood memories of being
wowed by the machinery of his father’s
textile business. The exhibition “Objects
U SA”
further opened his eyes to the pos-
sibilities of craft art: “I realize now that
from the very beginning my concern has
been more with textile as image rather
than textile as a means of image making.”
Already Seelig’s Vertical Shields and
Cinctures from the late 1970s differ from
the roughly textured, emotionally charged
handmade hangings dominant at the time.
In his double weave abstractions he ex-
ploits the play between tension and com-
pression to control form, and creates a
skin and skeleton relation by inserting rigid
Mylar strips between the fabric planes.
Embedded color assumes new significance
in his masterful Ribbon Folds from the early
1980s. In these warp-faced grosgrain works,
color bands of varying width result from
the complex weave of sewing thread at 180
ends per inch. Light dances along their
ribbed surface and brings out their three-
dimensionality. So does their diagonal
wrapping between two steel rods, which
reveals an identical front and back pattern.
Like Joan Livingstone, Anne Wilson
and other contemporaries, Seelig made the
decision to abandon the loom, first seen
in his arcing spoke-and-axle structures from
the early 1980s. Intuitively designed, these
fluted aerial works evoke the thrill of ex-
perimental flying machines. Their skins are
continuous strips of monochromatic stained
organdy mesh, dyed rip-stop nylon and
Tyvek paper, among other materials, tautly
stretched over stainless steel, fully visible
skeletons. The tension is palpable and en-
dows a sense of life. In some, a lathe-turned
counterweight maintains equilibrium.
Returning to the wall, Seelig’s Shadow-
fields expand on the nascent energy fields
of his earlier flat works. Their basic dynamic
involves interweaving and pruning modular
elements that project at different lengths
from a trellis. With the play of light and
shadow now paramount, the materials are
increasingly intangible, from the red shale
shards of
Stone Carpet Shadowfield,
2005,
which suggests a meeting between an aster-
oid field and the Maine shoreline, to the
reflecting, refracting Lucite balls in
Shadow-
field Crystal,
2009. In
Shadowfield White
Drawing,
2009, the trellis disappears and
the sublime takes over. Shadows bouncing
off the white wall gain in substance over
the complex interconnected densities of
linear steel triangles painted white.
“Textile per se” confirmed Seelig’s stat-
ure as a major artist, writer, teacher and
curator. In work after work, we experi-
enced the endless potential of a textile-
based language, the wonder of material
transformation and the harmonious bal-
ance of process and meaning.
Based
in
Washington,
DC,
Sarah Tanguy
is an independent curator and critic, as well as
a curator for the Art in Embassies Program.
*
The catalog is $40, store.mica.edu.
june/julyio american craft 035
www.WorldMags.net & www.Journal-Plaza.net
