Frances Whitehead
By Fred Camper
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Whitehead’s most dazzlingly precise work consists of two glass vessels hung, one above the other, from metal cables. Each vessel was custom blown for Whitehead by students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; she’s added metal snouts with tiny holes to the funnellike bottoms, which release liquid one drop at a time. The upper vessel contains absinthe, the lower water, which is turning cloudy as the absinthe mixes with it. Below the lower vessel is a knee-high, 600-pound sugar cube, and absinthe water drips continually on the cube’s center. Whitehead told me that, among other things, this piece refers to a drink popular in 19th-century France (“very well documented in art history”) in which water was poured over a small sugar cube into a liquor containing absinthe-flavored anisette.
Whitehead, 42, a sculpture professor at the School of the Art Institute, grew up in Richmond; both her parents are artists, and her mother’s interests in mathematics and topology were influential. A grandfather was a horticulturist. Nature started entering Whitehead’s work in 1987, when she began her own garden in Chicago–a “pastoral response,” she calls it in her statement, an effort to escape “the immediate oppressive environment in favor of a walled ‘Paradise.’” She follows her wide-ranging interests wherever they may lead–absinthe, for example–and is “greatly interested” in the way that words beginning with A have recurred in her recent work. She also mentions the influence of “the self-conscious historicism of Richmond–Virginians are preoccupied with history. I grew up around neoclassical architecture, and there is a utopianism in that neoclassicism. As a child I was trundled off in school buses to Monticello and Mount Vernon.”
At the center of Supra is a mysterious elongated shape. Brown branches are dimly visible near its edges, but most of it is black; at first one has the feeling of staring into the heart of a thicket, but there’s something a little too symmetrical about the shape for it to be organic. Another look at the title, and at a few of the other titles (Integra, Olds Calais), and one realizes that the dark shapes in many of the paintings are inspired by automobiles. In her statement, Campbell says that the “central shapes are borrowed from contemporary culture.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “installation by Francis Whitehead”.
