Review: Elizabeth Lide at whitespace — a rich, singular attic of the mind

Oddments of the Lean State, Elizabeth Lide’s site-specific, full-gallery installation at whitespace (through April 19) is as rich and singular as its title. A visit reads like a walk through a curious museum of found and allegorical objects, an attic of the mind, and this century-old former carriage house is a perfect venue for the collection.

The Atlanta-based artist has gathered objects — both made and found (or acquired) — from four decades and 14 installations of work (1980-2020). She has integrated these with sound compositions made in collaboration with her husband, Paul Kayhart, projection (including her collagist film O Nabû in peepspace, whitespace’s tiny gallery viewed through an exterior “peephole”) and newer work made since 2020. It’s an attempt, she writes in her statement, to “synthesize seemingly disparate groups of objects,” employing the perspective she has gained with time and distance to look at and for meaning both old and new. This is a daunting task.

Imagine 40 years of your own life. What would you select to represent the days, months and years of your experience? What would it all look like together? This is the task Lide set out for herself. From the looks of it, her life has been one of art and artmaking, family, social engagement and deep reflection.

Hers is a body of work like time itself: the new, forged from and carrying with it the old — a bit of everything all at once and yet each moment singular.

Here are family keepsakes — intensely personal but made universal by the sentimental weight of the well-loved object — a hank of black hair, a silver chatelaine, monogrammed handkerchiefs (perhaps her father’s?) neatly stacked in a small cardboard suitcase, a green rocking chair, antique christening gowns.

Some of these objects, along with artifacts of her own life and work, reside reliquary-like in vitrines; others in Cornell-like boxes on shelves or tabletops alongside her artist’s books or molds she made in paper pulp or plaster from family vases and urns (I felt privileged to recognize some of these from her 2017 exhibition at MOCA GA.) along with some of those keepsakes and a framed poem by Chinese American writer Ha Jin.

Lide describes her approach to arranging the material as “stream-of-consciousness,” allowing the objects to speak to her and to each other in “fresh and unanticipated ways.”

Best among these are the dozen small wall-mounted sculptures that evoke Chilean-born artist Cecilia Vicuña’s precario, which is what she calls her intimately-scaled, poetic sculptures made from found or cast-off objects. Lide holds mere nostalgia at bay with a fine editorial eye; she manipulates, arranges and juxtaposes, acting on these objects as they have acted upon her.

Lide’s small objects ask big questions. The success of her efforts pivots on the fact that she opens what is the most personal of explorations, investigating one’s own past, to the subjective interpretation of each viewer.

Each time I visited, I noticed new things and made new associations. Thinking critically, I searched for a thread that would lead me to one intended interpretation, but I ultimately decided that, in the best of ways, there was none.

Lide wisely leaves it up to our own interpretation. There are clues, however, in her choice of title: oddments, defined as “a remnant or part of something left over from a larger piece,” and of the lean state from Thomas Jefferson’s response to his daughter Martha’s complaint of insects in the Monticello vegetable garden. He responds: “I suspect that the insects which have harassed you have been encouraged by the feebleness of your plants; and that has been produced by the lean state of your soil.”

The prominence of this quote raises the specter (as does Lide in her statement) of politics, if we can even describe what is currently happening in our country as politics, and begs the question: Who among us are the “insects” doing the harassing and which of us are the feeble plants? How did we let our proverbial soil get so lean? So surely, some of Lide’s attempt at order is both a way of seeing and a search for meaning.

This is a show that asks the questions rather than answers them. In her statement, she muses upon that very subject, asking what original meanings have stayed the same, which are “loaded with new significance” and “what connections and interpretations . . .  viewers [will] make” that she has not.

Quotes from artists, writers and her own family rotate in a projection on a brick corner wall re-inforcing a historic, literary quality of the show and the mind of the artist. Words from sculptor Eva Hesse rhyme with the Hesse-like string construction over which they materialize: “Art is what it is . . . abstract symbol, not . . . for something else, detached, but intimate/personal.”

Words from sculptor Anne Truitt share the thesis of the show. By highlighting Truitt’s affirmation of belief in the existence of the interconnectedness, the mutual integrity, the “order of all things — teleology of a life,” Lide illustrates her own belief in the teleological power of objects to carry history, to tell our story to others and, more importantly perhaps, to ourselves.

An artist talk is scheduled for Saturday, April 5, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.

::

Donna Mintz is a visual artist who writes about art and literature. A current studio artist at Atlanta Contemporary, her work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art and MOCA GA. She writes for the Sewanee Review, Sculpture magazine, BurnAway and ArtsATL, where she is a regular contributor. She recently completed a book on the life of writer James Agee and holds an MFA from Sewanee’s School of Letters at the University of the South.