On the third floor of the Sarasota Art Museum is an environment that envelops visitors in a world of shimmering Caribbean color and mysterious shadows that creep along the historic schoolhouse’s gray walls and wood floors. Nassau-born, Atlanta-based artist Lillian Blades calls her suspended assemblages veils.
The museum’s executive director, Virginia Shearer, offers a more colorful description.
“It's almost like she has pulled the canvas off the back of the painting, and she's pulled all of the image off the front of the painting, and what's suspended from the ceiling is what's in between, so they're quite special,” Shearer said.
To fully appreciate Blades' constructs, you have to know about her mother.
“Lillian's mother died in childbirth,” Shearer noted. “Lillian has done a lot of investigation, a lot of oral history with her family, a lot of learning about who her mother was as a person, what interested her.”
Her mother was a quilter.
“Once you know that, different sorts of interpretations of the work start to come together for you,” Shearer said. “You can almost see that all of these shapes, all these patterns are quilted together. Instead of stitching, she's using a kind of metallic knotting technique.”
The suspended tapestry-like veils are massive. They’re made of pieces of Plexiglas, wood, mounted family photographs and sundry found objects. Into each piece, Blades drills tiny holes for the metal filaments that splice one to another to form monumental assemblages and even a gazebo that’s surrounded by four hanging veils.
“So it's a lot of handwork, which is what goes into textiles and being a seamstress, working on quilts,” Shearer observed.
What makes these kaleidoscopic assemblages all the more intriguing is the realization that the artist works on them piecemeal and didn’t see the completed veils until they were up and on display.
Unique and immersive, “Through the Veil” is on display at the Sarasota Art Museum through October 25.
MORE INFORMATION:
“Through the Veil” is Lillian Blades’ first solo museum exhibition. It includes an array of recent and new work.
Blades originally trained as a painter.
“Lillian got her master's in fine arts as a painter, so she was very much trained and learned how to look at great works of art,” Shearer explained. “She was working in a pretty traditional vein, but there wasn't enough texture in painting to satisfy her, so at a certain point, she started to incorporate objects from her studio, including an old flip-flop that was made out of a rough-hewn cotton material. She slapped that onto the canvas and she was hooked from there. A lot of her work, and some of her early work that we have hanging on the walls, is more in that vein, in that tradition, so it looks quite like a canvas, but she's encrusted the canvas with three-dimensional materials, so there's a lot of color and depth and texture.”
A few years ago, Blades shifted from wall assemblages to her tapestry-like veils.
“These are sculptural works that hang from the museum’s ceilings,” Shearer noted. “The suspended works create environments that are meant to envelop viewers and invite them to look through them to a person or shadow on the other of the suspended veils.”
Both the suspended works and the wall pieces include a plethora of mirrors.
“They invite us to see ourselves reflected in the works,” Shearer observed.
Blades pushes the boundaries of her craft. In addition to mirrors, her densely layered works combine handcrafted and found objects that include picture frames, antique clocks, printed imagery, wood, acrylic and glass, which she wires together to form monumental pieces that extend from floor to ceiling.
“She's originally from the Bahamas, but grew up in Atlanta,” Shearer noted. “Her work is deeply influenced by her family, her roots in the Bahamas and growing up in the South, so a lot of what you see are very colorful and very painterly, with lots of color, shapes, lines and elements of art. They're really quite arresting, quite beautiful.”
Drawing from the vibrant visual language of the Caribbean, Blades incorporates rhythmic patterns and symbolic imagery into her artwork.
Blades’ assemblages pay homage to her mother, who died giving birth to her. Seeking a sense of grounding, Blades began collecting and transforming materials and objects that would allow her to reconnect with her family and her African roots. Drawing from patchwork and quilting traditions, she developed an assemblage technique in which she brings together fragmented elements in a way to reimagine her past and deepen her understanding of self.
The result is a patchwork of objects, ideas, and identities, manifesting as an elaborate, suspended maze. The artist’s search for connection unfolds as a kaleidoscope of color, form, and texture—immersing visitors in a dynamic dialogue between past and present, their surroundings, and their own reflections.
Anchoring the exhibition is Blades’ largest installation to date, a site-specific labyrinth of veils immersing viewers in a dynamic exchange between past and present, their surroundings and their own reflections.
The centerpiece of the suspended works is a gazebo surrounded by four veils.
“It was a project she originally did a couple of years ago for Atlanta Botanical Gardens,” Shearer said. “They have a wonderful commission program where they invite contemporary artists to make a new work in their orchid gallery once a year. Lillian won that commission and created this wonderful gazebo.”
When Blades made her site visit to the Sarasota Art Museum and she began to brainstorm with Shearer and associate curator Lacie Barbour, Blades immediately envisioned having her gazebo suspended in SAM’s tower gallery.
“But Lillian wanted to take it a step further, and so she made four additional veils,” Shearer continued. “That allows visitors to wind their way through this gorgeous work of art with its hot pinks, saturated colors, jewel tones, purples and greens. You've got a wonderful orange and yellow, and all of these work together to just create this really bright, incredibly compelling environment.”
The response from people who’ve seen the installation so far has been overwhelmingly positive.
“Visitors are describing [the exhibition] as very joyous, playful, colorful. It's very much in the craft tradition, but sort of playing with that craft that [at one time] was not considered fine art and is still, you know, I think up for grabs, whether most people consider more of a craft sensibility to be fine art. But a lot of contemporary artists are pushing in that direction, and so she and that sort of movement is something that we wanted to explore.”
While a number of works, like the gazebo, are older, pre-existing pieces, Blades made a number of works specifically for the Sarasota Art Museum show.
“A big part of what we do is we invite the artists to come down to Sarasota, see our beaches, experience the light here, meet the people and get to see what the museum looks like,” Shearer explained. “As you know, we occupy this repurposed 1926 schoolhouse that on the exterior looks like a medieval building. But inside, it's the height of the edgiest of contemporary museums with white walls, beautiful track lighting and exposed architectural elements in our ceilings. So the space is a very much a part of the end result of each exhibition. And it's really how the artists are inspired by the space and reacting to it that leads us to where we go with these exhibitions.”
The composition of Blades’ veils is extraordinary. The mainstay of the veils are plain Plexiglas pieces of various sizes and shapes. But sandwiched in between others are colored paper, glittery paper, silk screen prints and family photographs.
“In ‘Sunset,’ you can see yellows and oranges and even sort of the blue of the sky intermixed with family photographs,” Shearer pointed out. “Her family was very important to her, and is very important to her.”
The exhibition’s title, “Through the Veil,” signifies more than a viewer’s ability to look through the suspended tapestries. It references her own ability to look back in time to her origins.
“It’s history, ancestry and reaching back through the veil to touch these ancestors that walked and lived and produced long ago,” said Shearer. “For her, that’s the through line.”
Staging the veils
“It was important to Lillian and to us that the rooms in which the veils are displayed be dramatically lighted,” Shearer noted. “She wanted a lot of light to be bouncing off the reflective surfaces. She also wanted to create these large shadows on our white walls, which are kind of wonderful.”
Achieving just the right dichotomy of dramatic lighting and shadows entailed quite a bit of trial and error. It also required the museum to close off a number of its skylights.
“The lighting allows us to really accentuate the elements that Lillian has included in her veils,” Shearer explained. “It lets us show off, for example, the sequins at the top, sequins at eye level and all these mirrored squares, rectangles, and little circles to kind of catch your eye. And then, what's also so special is the realization that there's a lot of negative space. So the spaces between the different elements that she is knitting together also create these really interesting little portholes.”
Working in scale
Although Blades works on small sections, stitching one element to those that adjoin it, the completed veils are more than ten feet tall and two or three times that in width. That requires a fairly large work space. Interestingly, Blades maintains her studio in an old schoolhouse, which gives her the latitude to piece together her veils on conference tables and even the floor.
While she has a design in mind, a great deal of the assembly process is improvisational.
“It unfolds very organically,” Shearer noted. “She knows the end result she's driving towards, but perhaps not the exact journey that she’ll take to get there.”
Blades process requires considerable concentration and physical stamina.
“It’s very hard work,” Shearer conceded. She pointed to a one-inch-square piece of wood that was included in one of the veils.
“See there? See those four tiny holes she drilled in it in order to connect it to the pieces on all four sides? That requires a lot of care because, you know, you could very easily fracture a piece of wood or something like that if you drill it incorrectly. So you really have to pay attention to what you're doing.”
Wall Pieces
Although Blades’ veils are admittedly breathtaking, her wall pieces are equally complex and intriguing.
“In those, she's essentially assembling the work directly on a canvas or piece of wood,” Shearer noted. “A lot of the materials you see are found materials, although some are purchased and people give her materials as well.”
A number of Blades’ canvas assemblages take up a full section of wall.
“They’re large-scale canvases that have been painted and encrusted with glitter and little dots of paint and squiggle marks and all that good stuff,” Shearer noted. “And then on top of that, she's layering in empty picture frames, jewels, jewelry, mirrors and reflective surfaces.”
The mirrors and reflective surfaces invite viewers to see themselves in the work of art. Viewers are also encouraged to fill the empty frames that Blades incorporates into her compositions with memories of what have been and could be.
“It’s really poetic,” Shearer said. “I love this work. I mean, you can look at it all day and see something different each time, just really depending on where you focus.”
Blades’ work has been featured in galleries, museums and botanical gardens across the United States, as well as in The Bahamas, Trinidad, Germany and South Africa. Her public installations include the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and the State Farm Arena in Atlanta. Her works belong to the permanent collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Clark Atlanta University Art Museum and the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, among others.
“Lillian Blades: Through the Veil” is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Lacie Barbour, associate curator of exhibitions at Sarasota Art Museum.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.