Improvisations
Muse Art Gallery
52 N 2nd St.
Philadelphia
Nov. 24, 2024
In the garden of spontaneity, a seashell with lips and a goatee of toes is just another random artifact of evolution.
Such a garden is growing inside Muse Art Gallery, where a mother-daughter show titled “Improvisations” is patching up the relationship between artistry and outcome.
The exhibit is structured around Philadelphlia artist Kathran Siegel’s flowers and shells carved out of wood — visions of organic matter made out of more organic matter — with line drawings by Siegel’s daughter, Cassandra Petruchky, smattered throughout.
The common factor between the two mediums is not the familial connection: It’s an agreed-upon approach to creation.
“Our intention is to call attention to a way of working where the outcome is not planned in advance, but develops in real time, as the artist responds to the work, adding and subtracting marks, as she goes,” their shared artist statement reads. “While we are accustomed to searching for the one “right” answer, or outcome to a given problem, what makes one solution better than all others usually has to do with some broader agenda. Often it is only a matter of personal taste.”
Petruchky’s line portraits channel a kind of easy chaos, capturing the outward motion of facial expression through layered scribbles. Siegel’s artwork forges a deeper dynamic between flexibility and focus through hardcore carving. The result is a commentary on reproduction, rejecting a survival of the fittest philosophy in honor of sometimes arbitrary adaptation.
One outcome of that attitude is a collection of scallop-shaped wood carvings, the “wings” of which function as abstract canvases coated in primary colors pulled together by the so-called “ears,” replaced by Siegel with other wooden body parts, such as the lips with toes stick out of them like misplaced teeth; legs; fingers; flowers; and, in one case, a turtle head.
Though these odd, exquisite-corpse style characters are perhaps the most curious part of the show, the most compelling pieces were Siegel’s Seussical flower cuttings.
A giant pink bud, titled “Some Kind of Tree Pod,” balances on a podium, its vine curling off like a tail frozen in place. It, just like the shells, holds a sentient quality — it looks as though it could crawl right out of the gallery.
The walls are covered in climbing flowers, as well, that suggest movement through their striving stems, twisted around themselves and protruding out towards the viewer. A so-called “corsage” is a beautiful adornment of pink, blue and orange blossoms framed by bright green leaves.
Siegel’s refusal to sketch out her designs before whittling away at the wood imbues her sculptures with a tangible liveliness; the end products are, in a way, accidents made beautiful by Siegel’s hand. Carving involves shaping an unbending material, a forcible task, but Siegel’s sense of softness and indifference to perfection is what makes the curving and blooming branches so stunning.
The show offers a view of artistry that is not unlike motherhood. It’s a circumstantial process ruined by expectation. Siegel proposes that gentle tending to is the most successful technique to mastering acceptance over whatever you produce. Others then get to decide what they like and what they don’t; but the works should at least be entitled to unconditional love from their creator.
We live in a culture that treats control as currency — plastic surgery, for instance, is becoming inseparable from makeup as a means of perfecting appearance through the needle of assimilation. It’s hard not to view the societal obsession over self-presentation as a collective coping mechanism for dealing with the fact that our futures are largely predetermined by forces functioning beyond or outside our own spheres of power.
That’s what makes a flower show — one of the most antiquated but enduring forms of beauty — still feel fresh. Siegel has found a way to keep the bloom on the rose.
Improvisations is showing through the end of November at Muse Gallery. Find more information on the exhibit here.
