Exhibit review: Piece Together at the 500x Gallery in Dallas

by Lucia Simek of of Renegade Bus

In a show called Piece Together, artists Aqsa Shakil and Lesli Robertson both grapple with notions of process, Shakil with the processes of recorded memory and Robertson with the process of art-making itself.

Shakil’s half of the show made up of “Trekoids” — torn out pages from a Moleskin notebook with recorded moments, artifacts pinned to the wall or saved in jars, and elaborate drawings born of traveling experiences. The dozens and dozens of Moleskin pages all pinned neatly in rows at the front of the gallery tell the tales of various trips the artist took over the last two years: Dallas – London – Lahore, Lahore – Saudi Arabia – Dallas, Dallas – Los Angeles – Disneyland – Dallas, etc. The small pages are filled with the scribbled motions made from being jostled in vehicles, or from having her baby on her lap, as well as recorded thoughts or events, and a bounty of really excellent architectural renderings of buildings encountered along the way. Occasionally, Shakil has pinned some tangible artifact to the wall alongside the pages: a leaf or flower, a hotel room card, confetti. These act as memento mori, reiterating the passage of time.

Making the journey around the room to look at these pages is an act of voyeurism, the artist’s thoughts and personal instances laid bare to those willing to look. But the narrative of Shakil’s journey’s is left up to the viewer, who acts as editor of his or her own experience of the artist’s work, choosing to read or not to read, getting pulled into some notes and ignoring vast junks of others. And by installing one whole wall of pages above eye level, Shakil herself suggests that not all the pages must be inspected, rendering the installation like a kind of library with certain volumes out of reach. The gesture also allows the artist to create a sense of mystery around the content of the pages and maintain her privacy while heightening a viewer’s desire to see them.

The jars of fluid that Shakil has lined up along a wall in the adjacent space are the liquid translation of her Moleskin notes and tokens, recording a memory through the keeping of something tangible. The drawings in the back alcove of the gallery are rich and detailed things, culling from Middle Eastern and Indian pattern traditions and adding to them fantastical figurative elements: a screaming face most notable among them. These drawings are the take-away aspect of the show – the work that came as result of mulling over memory and making something from those recollections. They are the imaginative record made after-the-fact, beautiful and steeped in layered histories, and these leave me wondering what more Shakil’s work could be.

Her show is by all accounts a very personal, faceted one, but the viewer’s voyeuristic participation in it only drives the work intellectually to a point before the desire for something more begins to grow. It’s not the desire to know more about Shakil’s life necessarily, so much as the itch to see how many more iterations of memory keeping could be explored that would, perhaps, lend the artist’s work a dimension that transcends the personal and moves into the truly engaging. I kept wishing for sound while I looked at her gridded walls, or some play on material in the jars that would be both personal and abstract enough to warrant my wanting them to keep, as lovely looking as they are. But Shakil’s work here does have the wonderfully unsettling effect of making memory’s enigmatic nature wholly palpable: that strong desire for “more,” for something more graspable, certainly has its poetic metaphors in memory and recollection itself.

The work of Leslie Robertson that runs in tandem with Aqsa Shakil’s is quiet and delicate. Robertson pulls from her research of Ugandan craft culture and its processes and considers her own efforts of object making in a series of cast concrete sculptures and black and white structural drawings. Her concrete sculptures are made up of layer upon layer of concrete that is embedded with fragments of cloth and objects. Some sculptures protrude from the wall like great big door handles; others are hollow boxes strung together with twine, the whole set marching down the face of the wall; and one group of narrow square rods lean into the wall at angles like tiny lean-to beams.

The odd little family groups that Robertson makes with these objects, and the variations in color and texture in each one, add a humanizing touch to the otherwise cold material of concrete. Her background as a textile artist (look for her leadership over the DMA’s current community project in the Center for Creative Connections) informs her sculptures with an airiness that makes the material seem light and porous. The white drawings on black paper that run alongside her wall pieces are the counterweight to her delicate sculptures. These are 2-D renderings of her objects, though only barely so – the drawn lines are hardly there sometimes, and the dimensionality of the object is lost to the black of the paper. They are more suggestions of what’s to come than a real working idea, but they point, just like Shakil’s Moleskin pages, to the journey toward an end. The process.