In her eponymous Montpelier gallery, artist Susan Calza has installed a new selection of old works. “Our Demons Are Translucent” consists of large, ink drawings and mixed-media assemblages unearthed from a studio in Barre that she’s just vacated. “I hadn’t been using it,” she said. “I’m doing video more now.”
The drawings are just a fraction of the works she made over about a decade, following a 2013 sabbatical in Nepal.
Three of Calza’s drawings hang in the front windows of the gallery and can be seen from the outside in reverse — the Mylar, too, is translucent. The central drawing, the largest at 96 by 36 inches, is titled “Bye Bye BdG.” It’s an homage to Chicago-based artist Barbara DeGenevieve, a dear friend who died at age 67, Calza explained. Her body is blue; her head is loosely gestural and not at all anatomically correct.
Calza made this image and all the others with her nondominant hand, she said. She likes how drawing that way requires her to stay “in the moment, present.”
Flanking Barbara are what Calza called “self-portrait pieces” — skeleton-like studies with embedded faces. “I ended up doing a series of skeletons and nudes” after living in Kathmandu, Calza said. “Life and death are so close there.”
All these years later, she added, gesturing around the gallery, “I finally know what all this is about. It’s different from my previous work, which was more personal. This is the crux of where the work started to get more political.”
Elements of Calza’s psyche certainly present themselves here, in pieces such as the large-scale “Mother was home but every room is empty.” In it, faces and house motifs, drawn with sumi and walnut inks, float in a sea of white space. “Images of home always come up for me,” Calza commented.
Across the room, a drawing of parted lips perhaps three feet wide is drawn with red lipstick — a reference to dental issues, Calza said. “I’ve always had crooked teeth and a space,” she said. “But now I don’t care.” Sprinkled all over the image, including on individual teeth, are iterations of the word “fuck.”
Asked for the title, Calza smiled and said, “‘Fuck, Fuck…’ — at least eight of them.” It’s a visceral, relatable drawing that can speak to all manner of angst.
One of the assemblages, cryptically titled “Don’t You Think I’m Sexy,” is a tangle of film strips suspended from the ceiling. “We tend to project things on people,” Calza explained.
On a rectangle of maize-colored Nepali lokta paper, Calza drew a grid and adorned some of the squares with little faces, again using sumi ink. Other, seemingly random squares are filled with 23-carat gold, she said. Lit from behind, the piece is a lovely, luminous checkerboard.
To the artist, the piece is about “trying to understand grief and transition.” So, really, is the entire exhibition.
“It’s so weird seeing your past,” Calza mused.
“Our Demons Are Translucent” is on view through March 25 at Susan Calza Gallery in Montpelier, with a reception on Friday, February 17, 5 to 7 p.m. susancalza.com
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This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2023.
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