Laura Piasta: Sounding the Ultraviolet
At Access Gallery until January 30, 2016

Laura Piasta’s small show at Access Gallery spotlights her eclectic range of media and working methods—from gilding wooden sculpture to weaving cotton yarn to casting found objects in beeswax or Hydro-Stone. In a provocative rejoinder to poststudio practice, and a kind of push-back to concept-driven and theory-referenced art, this emerging Vancouver artist explores the “intelligence” inherent in her materials. She investigates traditional art-making techniques and, at the same time, interrogates the relationship between objects and ideas.

Piasta also vexes the distinction between high art and craft, as seen in her recent experiments with marbled paper, displayed under glass at the front of the gallery and featured in a limited-edition bookwork at the back. What is interesting here is not merely her pursuit of a centuries-old decorative technique, which we know largely through its appearance on the inside covers of antique books. The charm of Piasta’s paper marbling, as Access director-curator Kimberly Phillips writes, is that the artist has flipped its traditional role, unsettling fixed notions of its value and its significance. The marbled paper no longer resides at the “periphery” of the book but constitutes the book’s entire contents.

There is also charm in Piasta’s homages to earlier Vancouver artists such as Liz Magor and Gathie Falk. Stone Fruit is a small pyramid of bananas, each one cast in Hydro-Stone and spray-coated with faux-stone paint. (The paint is identified by Phillips as “the kind used in home-crafting projects”.) The allusion to Falk’s ceramic fruit piles of the 1970s is obvious, but where Falk’s oranges, apples, and grapefruit are all brilliant colour, lush form, and glossy finish—an affirmation of life and a testament to its everyday beauty—Piasta’s bananas, with their dreary, speckled, grey surface, their uniformity, and their strangely inert configuration, look deathly, like a small tomb or a cairn. (Still, we can’t help thinking there’s a visual and verbal play here on the expression “stone fruit”, which occurs so often in the parlance of wine writers and connoisseurs.)

Piasta’s Magnetic Jean Jacket is reminiscent of Magor’s silicone-rubber sculptures of the late 1990s, which the older artist cast from everyday objects such as backpacks and purses, and also of her use of found articles of clothing hung casually on the wall. As the title of Piasta’s work suggests, the younger artist has covered a culturally charged item of clothing with magnetic paint, shifting its charge into the realm of natural phenomena and the invisible forces that play across our physical existence. Amusingly, a few small metal objects, such as finishing nails and a safety pin, adhere to one of the jacket’s cuffs.

Acoustic Panel With Fringe makes general rather than specific allusions, including to the monochrome paintings and minimalism of the 1960s and ’70s, along with the handwoven articles (and fringe-adorned clothing) associated with the counterculture of the same period. There’s also the reference to sound, but its evocation here is strangely silent. As Phillips writes, the work “quite literally weaves together a consideration of sound, painting, and textiles”. Again, Piasta’s art prompts us to be aware of unseen forces and phenomena.

What is evident in this show is an abundance of astuteness, awareness, and technical facility, along with what Phillips identifies as an embrace of “vibrant materialism”. We’re still waiting, however, for Piasta to find her own voice amid a myriad of problems and possibilities.