Stewart Watson’s Possessions at McDaniel College’s Rice Gallery is a collection of remembrances. Watson transforms furniture and objects imbued with her family’s past into questions about the worth of an heirloom. In the past, Watson’s work explored genealogy and in this new body of work she deepens that exploration by examining what remains of a family after each generation passes away: the stuff they leave behind. In Watson’s hands the furniture of grandparents, the signatures of aunts found on old pages, and the picture frames that held photographic proof that past relatives existed become more than old junk forgotten in an attic. By reverently scrutinizing the belongings of ancestors, Watson serves as a custodian of memory.
Watson acts as part artist and part curator with this collection of work. The use of color, texture, and material is less a matter of choice and more a product of collection. By using found antique materials like the settee, rocking chair, brocade, wooden table, picture frames, and chalkboard, Watson draws the viewer into the past and incorporates history as an element of her work. The muted green, blue, and gold of the fabric carries the aesthetic of a previous age and the worn wood of the deconstructed table mounted on the wall and picture frames arranged on the floor show signs of age.
Why do we cling to objects of the past? Perhaps objects retain the memories and sensations from our past in powerful and ineffable ways. An old rocking chair might be most apt at expressing a memory so intangible it can never truly be put into words. The furniture and objects we live with are witness to the sequential string of events and emotions that define our lives; unconsciously, we associate object and memory until the two become uniquely linked. Watson tugs at that association to understand the strength of that link and question its meaning for our present lives. It is in that link that the true value of our possessions comes to light. Watson’s work is a testament that the Watson family has lived and left its mark, however small, on the stream of time, and in examining the traces they left behind, traces that refuse to be forgotten, Watson questions what value there might be to holding on to a collective physical memory.
Possessions engages the full space of the Rice Gallery with pieces from floor to ceiling, on windowsills and walls. Much of the work appears to be floating: deconstructed parts of a table are mounted on the wall as if the wood parts had separated and spread away from each other; a settee frame is suspended in midair; placed at loose intervals, drawings rest lightly on the folds of a large swath of fabric stretched across the length of three standing panels; a rocking chair perches precariously on a steel pole high overhead. The space Watson creates is loose, open, organic, and a little nonsensical, much like the conceptual space memory occupies in our minds. The arrangement of the pieces in Possessions is more than presentation, it is part of the work.
The exhibit reads like an inchoate memoir. Memoir relies on the objects from our past—particularly the ones that anchor us to memories significant to the formation of identity—to make what has happened long ago vivid and present today. Watson, who wishes to reinvent her family’s possessions of old to give them new purpose, engages in a creative process shared by the memoirist. Threads of meaning exist in the attic, in the garage, in the junk pile. Watson searches for those threads to weave together into a new understanding of past and self.
Possessions: Stewart Watson will be on display at Rice Gallery−McDaniel College, Westminster, Maryland through February 22, 2013.
Author Dani Allen is a Senior Studio Art Major at McDaniel College
