Aisha Harrison is a prominent sculptor in Olympia. You will have seen her powerful sculpture “Woman with Graves at Her Back” on the Percival Plinth in 2021, which was purchased and added to the City’s public art collection. Harrison’s ability to express emotion with facial expression, body language, and texture, accompanied by surreal imagery is masterful. Her pieces carry an emotional and physical gravity, whether it be in small, quiet intimacy or more grandiose scale. Her work holds a quiet yet commanding presence that speaks in both soft and sonorous volumes.
Paige Pettibon is a multidisciplinary artist from Tacoma specializing in painting, but her many areas of expertise also include skills in sewing, creative writing, digital art, and jewelry making. Pettibon’s paintings have a quiet serenity accompanied by enigmatic storytelling elements thrown in with dramatic emphasis. Her depicted figures have a statuesque, luminescent, soft-focus quality, achieved by layering translucent paint over paint, giving an atmospheric, ethereal, other-worldly glow. Her color palette is semi-limited but bold with beautiful well-chosen color accents. The subtle warm glow of multiple skin-tones live adjacent to a cooler more limited palette background, accented by popping detail of their hair with superfine brushwork.
Together, their work delivers orchestrated messages, respecting and supporting each other’s voice, singing a similar song which gives you many things to think about. Harrison and Pettibon have much in common, they both practice their disciplines with similar concerns in mind, they both utilize a rich, visually allegorical narrative, incorporating surrealism as a means of communication to express the niche space they occupy in the world. They are both deeply rooted generationally to their respective home spaces and speak of the practice of observing and tending the environment where they live.
Pettibon says she finds much inspiration in her surroundings. Her connections with the past, present and future provide the narratives for her art, which reflects community and family. Her connections prompt the stories she tells in a seaming continuous cycle of conversation with her audience, reflecting that we have the same passions, desires, histories and interconnection. She notes that for her to be here today, her ancestors worked really hard for the generations after them, that she is here to honor their efforts and struggles through her work.
Harrison’s home environment, honoring ancestors, are also predominant in her work. Her family has been living in the same place for four generations. One of her biggest inspirations is her sense of belonging to a place. She has a deep connection to the land she lives on, she observes the birds and the trees daily. Watching the nuanced way things change, she says the continuity is inspiring. Harrison acknowledges we’re on unceded land while also speaking of a sense of belonging. The land she dwells on has long roots within her body, she holds both those realities in one place in her consciousness.
Speaking of her art practice, Harrison says she finds problem-solving, tending, and detail-oriented things inspiring. She gets excited about working out something challenging in her studio. She speaks of the gratification in trying, failing, succeeding, then maybe trying again and figuring out a different way of doing things. Her work is meditative, and she finds it rewarding when people tell her that her work connects with them. Not because they may like her work, but because she was able to get something across and make them feel some kind of emotion or understanding, affirming that she’s not simply doing it for herself.
Pettibon too enjoys problem-solving, but unlike Harrison, she says she usually enjoys changing things up a lot. She tries to be accurate and well informed, trying to squeeze in as much knowledge as she can before starting, because she wants it to be the most well-informed piece she can do, resulting in a snapshot of what she’s capable of doing in that moment, so it has its own type of magic. It becomes a capsule holding a legacy that goes on without her.
Both artists are from mixed cultures and heritage. Harrison from Black and Caucasian, Pettibon from Black and Native heritage. Pettibon says that because she is mixed, she sees a lot of the grey areas in life while living in that space, so she likes to build bridges for people. She recognizes that it’s hard for the people who dwell in the Black and White to see the grey area in a way that makes sense to them, she finds it easier to communicate in a visual language in a way that the verbal language doesn’t work for her.
On this subject, Harrison says she made a lot of self-referential work in the past because she was trying to figure out how she saw herself, personally and through making her artwork; not necessarily how her work is seen from someone else’s perspective as much as asking herself, “who am I, and do I belong anywhere? Because like Paige, I am mixed, and there’s a lot of tension for mixed people that non-mixed people do not understand at all.” she said she would make work, and no one would get it. Eventually it pushed her further down into herself, becoming surer about how she thinks of herself and less concerned about what other people think of her or her work. She arrived at the conclusion that it’s more important to make the work that needs to be made than to try and teach people about racism or how it feels to have complicated histories within your body.
Pettibon says she hopes her work is like medicine, speaking to something really hard-rooted in a population’s trauma, but she always wants people to feel taken care of, so you don’t feel a burden when you leave. She needs to have a silver lining, some kind of hope (they both agree on hope). Pettibon’s prayers are for bad guys to break from the shell of privilege and censorship of humanity. She’d like people to see a beauty and a sense of connection with her work, even if they don’t see themselves represented in it. She enjoys people’s stories of what they see in her work when they share what they take from it, even if their story wasn’t her intention.
When asked about who and how their work speaks to people, they say it’s not their job to tell people how to feel about their art, although they do enjoy hearing what their work means to others. Harrison says that she does strive for connection, but she doesn’t necessarily feel that it’s important that every viewer knows what she’s trying to express. She says her desire is more to pursue an emotional response or feeling.
Pettibon says she hopes that her work is approachable and communicates to all, but she also doesn’t worry too much about how her work is seen by others, saying it’s not her job to stress about how her work is interpreted. Her pieces go through different phases, and she takes a combination of resources through research, collecting and meditating through the materials, shaping how she wants it to look. When she knows it’s done, she puts it out into the world and has no control over how people respond or react to it. She’s learned how to let that go; she says once it’s out of your hands, it’s up to you to just stand by it, it’s ok to explain where it’s coming from but mostly it speaks for itself, and others have their own interpretations which often enhances the experience of the piece. She says that’s what’s cool about creative expression — that people get to interpret it in their own ways.
Both Harrison and Pettibon talked about sharing a vivid dream space, which is like a reality to them. They talk about each other’s works as something they can tap into, reflect on the kinship and resonance their works have, and the strength their work gains from sharing the museum space. They acknowledge the insight of Victoria Miles, the curator who had the vision of putting them together and welcome opportunities to take the show to other venues. It’s a beautiful and thoughtful show. Go see it before it moves on.
Photos by Lynette Charters Serembe.
WHAT:
tomakesenseofitall — a joint fine art show with Aisha Harrison and Paige Pettibon
WHEN:
10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday through Oct. 19
WHERE:
Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave, Tacoma
COST:
Thurs 5-8 p.m. free admission to all. Day admission to all shows: adults $18, kids $10, senior and military $15, yearly family $85 (2 adults and immediate kids), yearly single $50, $125 yearly pass includes access to approximately 1000 museums in the US
LEARN MORE:
info@TacomaArtMuseum.org