Museum Exhibition on display through the Holiday break

Portland, Ore. artist Lena McGrath Welker has spent the last six years toiling away on her exhibition that fills the galleries of the North Dakota Museum of Art through Jan. 9, 2011.

To view installation images, visit www.ndmoa.com or like the Museum on Facebook.

In 2004, McGrath showed four bodies of work in the Museum from her on-going Navigation Series. At that time, Museum director Laurel Reuter invited her to return with the final installation. Twelve years in the making, the Navigation series concludes with “Chime.”

The overarching theme of the Navigation series, both in the 2004 exhibition and in the current show, addresses ways of thinking about the accumulation and transmission of knowledge and wisdom. What gives written language its power? In what ways does language fail us, and in what ways does it allow communication to take place?

Three hundred stainless steel stands support the floating, porcelain, wordless books of Navigation [sea change], created to fill the mezzanine gallery. Welker tested and tested until she found the finest porcelain on the market and then applied silver and palladium leaf to the surfaces to suggest the glint of sunlight on the ocean.

In the alcove of the upstairs gallery, the viewer will find “Chart” with small stacks of incised glass tablets. They are accompanied by vitrines filled with hand-dyed, indigo folios embellished with drawings and stitched imagery of what appear to be arcane maps. Floating above them are huge drawings incorporating Ptolemy’s diagrams, star measurements, constellations, abstract counting marks, the geometry of navigation systems, signs and symbols from Greek mathematical texts, and scanned images of deep-sky nebulae.

The sixteen-foot high, steel skeleton for a dovecote anchors “Flight” in the west gallery of the main floor, the inside of which will be skinned with translucent paper. The dovecote is home to funerary urns, blackened bronze and copper begging bowls resting on a low slate wall, and 120 often-blank, bound books stacked on the floor. Accompanying the dovecote are some 3,000, nine-inch fabric squares, each having either a single feather attached, or stitching that conveys a sense of writing or counting. They hang from the ceiling beams on fine thread, like Tibetan prayer flags. The feathers represent ideas as the Greeks first conceived them.

Repetition abounds throughout the Museum echoing the repetition of the mantra in meditation, of reoccurring themes in a musical composition, of sewing and weaving and chanting, of waves rolling across a vast ocean.

In the east gallery and hovering just above the floor is an empty organdy room made from bolts of cotton fabric donated by the Pennsylvania company Testfabrics. This centerpiece for the installation, “Stillness,” is surrounded by eight, fifteen-foot, vertical, paper scrolls drawn with dry pigment and graphite. Beneath them are rows of alabaster cairns and small porcelain scrolls.

Navigation “Affinis” consists of 30 prints embedded in handmade abaca paper, hanging on steel frames in the space between the east and west galleries. Their images connect “Flight” in the west to “stillness” in the east.

The artist named the exhibition “Navigation “Chime” because “chime has poetic and musical derivation, but it also refers to a system in which all the parts are in harmony, showing a correspondence of proportion or relation.” The artist imagines her wordless books as “a continuation of ancient books still with us, so carefully and beautifully bound, with folios of handmade paper, their words so arcane and unintelligible to us now as to disappear from the page.”

According to the artist, “Many of the materials are light enough to move with the ambient air currents, and with people walking by. People respond to this movement with a ‘bodily’ intelligence, instinctively becoming quiet and walking more slowly. As sunlight pours through the windows and warms the rooms, the scents of silk and indigo are released.”

The Museum hours are weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and weekends from 1  to 5 p.m. The Museum Shop is open during these hours. There is no general admission for viewing exhibitions, visiting the Museum Shop or the Museum Café.

— Brian Lofthus, Museum, 777-4195, blofthus@ndmoa.com.