Rounding the leaden door of the so-called “Cooler” gallery, we are transported, like Alice down the rabbit hole, into a world in which our existence is diminutive in the presence of an enormous severed string of pearls. Of course, the sensation of being made small by a work of art is nothing new, evoking the sublime often being the artist’s goal. However, in the case of Lisa Gralnick’s Scene of the Crime, what dwarfs the viewer is not only the colossal sculpture, but rather the act which created this spectacle and our interactions with the piece.
Pearls are the world’s oldest gems, found among the tombs of Egyptian queens, referenced in ancient Chinese texts, and imbedded in Greek jewelry. Before the discovery of modern cultivation techniques, pearls were both financially and, at times, legally out of the reach of anyone not of royal or noble blood. Functioning as symbols of the wearer’s purity, piousness, and often femininity, strings of pearls often stand in for their iconic owners, Coco Channel, Jackie Kennedy, Grace Kelly and Marge Simpson to name a few.
Curiously, from their conception, pearls are products of irritation— being formed by particles covered in layer upon layer of a crystalline substance excreted by their mollusk craftsmen. Gralnick’s work is also seeded by a similar punctum. The gesture of tearing off one’s pearls— be it by one’s own hand in a fit of hysteria, like the femme fatale staring in a film noir, or by an assailant, as in the case Bruce Wayne (Batman)’s Mother’s tragic demise— is a trope of climactic rejection of their emblematic affluence.
Scene of the Crime poses the viewer in the position of witness, or perhaps investigator, of such a dramatic and pivotal episode. The larger than life evidence imbues the claustrophobic “Cooler Gallery” with echoing and inescapable lines of questioning: “What happened here?”; “Who has done this?”; and “Why?” A single matching pearl stud lays discarded near the exit, its partner no where to be found— hinting that the owner escaped the Scene of the Crime and still is at large.
-Lauren Miller
About the author: Lauren is the newest addition to the Abel Gallery, bringing with her a BA with Honors and two years of PhD work from the University of Wisconsin— Madison in Art History and Visual Cultures; several years of curatorial and exhibition work for the Chazen Museum of Art, the James Watrous Gallery, and the Ebling Library; and an unrelenting enthusiasm for the Arts. She engages with interdisciplinary topics running the gamut from nineteenth-century spiritualist photography and victorian sorcery, to phenomenological examinations of Cézanne and his contemporaries, to early anatomical texts.