July 11 – July 17, 2014
Santa Barbara News-Press, Scene Magazine (p. 51).

BEYOND THE MARGINAL
Printmaker Bay Hallowell Works at the Juncture of Text, Graphic Design and Manipulations in the Margins, in her Faulkner Show ‘Marginalia’

By Josef Woodard, News-Press Correspondent

Printmaker Bay Hallowell often seems to surf around available and accidental influences and idea-triggers, which may give rise to a new series of expressions.  Such is the case in her deceptively simple and enigmatic exhibition called “Marginalia,” now aptly nestled in the cozy nook of the Faulkner West Gallery at the downtown public library.

In that small, long room, the artist can be found experimenting and improvising, visually mumbling and snooping in the margins of a good idea, shuffling letters and linguistic meanings, and generally ferreting out the theme of the very word of the show’s title.  Using monoprints and stencils, collographs and other media, she stacks the letters and reorders them, scruffs them up, leaves them polished or affects them with sundry printmaking techniques.  But whatever the variation or accentuation of each piece, “Marginalia” is the word in the epicenter of this artist’s playful arena.

Artists have long been fascinated by the power of select words and phrases, fodder for treatments and distortions in a more visual than language-related way.  Ed Ruscha has made a career out of painted, loaded words on canvas, and Jim Dine has found himself in love (ironically and otherwise) with the word—and heart-shaped symbol for—“love.”  Deeper in art history, Bauhaus design notions explored the expressive potential of letters and Kurt Schwitters and other Dadaists and deconstructionist types have latched onto language for reuse and recycling in their artistic language. 

In this case, Ms. Hallowell has a ripe word to mess around with, as visual putty, having to do with the digressionistic scribblings in the margins of a text, or the quality of that which is presumably “marginal,” but possibly a case of profundity in the periphery.

By virtue of the artist honing in on a very specific thematic target for her “variations on a theme” series, the word itself becomes a hypnotic blur.  Following the progression and sequence of pieces, especially in those numbered 1 to 16, we intuitively sense a kind of quasi-narrative flow, through the investigations and reinventions.  No. 10 has a dreamy, liquid-y overlay, while 12 finds the letters subjected to a mad scramble and fragmentation effect, rendered nearly illegible except as pure design, and 16 pits the word—in an early 20th century, Art Deco font—sandwiched between a warm yellow-orange-green foundation and the random ratatat of black dot-splatters on the surface.

Other later variations continue the process of plumbing expressive possibilities within the artist’s self-limited source.  In a few pieces, commercial letters are placed in a hip pattern with a shambling, tumbling charm a la Mr. Schwitters’ “Merz” aesthetic.  As if capping off the series with a ghostly echo of a finale, “Marginalia Trace 1, 2, 3” consists of the hand-scrawled word in positive and negative forms, suggesting a palimpsest-like hint of archeological enigma.  Marginalia rarely seemed so centered, and curiosity inflaming.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

March 31, 2012

YOGIC IMPRESSIONS, FOR ART’S SAKE

Bay Hallowell’s show of vividly-colored monoprints at Architectural Foundation Gallery appeals to yoga devotees and the yoga-challenged alike

by Josef Woodard, News-Press Correspondent

No doubt, an art exhibition calling itself “Chakra Chimes” is going to self-select its audience, naturally luring some in while possibly deterring others. But while Bay Hallowell’s current show of eye’s mind seducing monoprints at the Architectural Foundation Gallery has roots in her longtime involvement with yoga and the ancient color/sound/body philosophy of chakras, the art also speaks for itself.

In part, what grabs the art watcher’s eye is a sensibility of friendly tension in the form and content of her work here, within strictly-defined parameters. The contiguous series of 2110-by-10-inch prints around the gallery can be appreciated as singular pieces, and also as a kind of serial journey.

Hallowell’s recent series of prints, deceptively direct and simple-looking at first blush, are actually more complex and elusive than expected. Forms and shapes allude to things we know, or think we know -- plant life, sun and moon incarnations, grounding horizons, maybe even an undersea life form or two. And yet things are at once more abstract and more coolly symmetrical than immediate impressions allow, pushing the imagery into the realm of the mystical and the meditative.

Stylistically too, the seeming centered clarity and symmetry of each piece is offset by overlapping edges and superimposed shapes. Nothing is hard and fast, clean-lined or easily-explained in this art, and to its expressive credit.

Cosmic evocations can at times also incorporate comic touches, as with the title of the strangely perky “Rootie Patootie Mama,” its central subject suggesting a cross between a hip hybrid root vegetable and a mutant squid-like beast. Titles layer on ambient impressions to what we’re seeing in some cases, as with “Simmer Smoulder” and “Pink Honey Heart Hum,”while the temperature turns atypically more brooding with “Dirge for an Empty Heart.”

As the artist described in a statement, in creating this specialized body of work, “Meditating and musing on this configuration and the specific color and sound associated with each chakra was my starting point. The sometimes diffuse, sometimes concentrated, always shifting nature of chakra energies led me into experiments with a variety of shapes, colors, combinations, and compositions.”

That said, the yoga-challenged among us will find something to savor here: this is not just art for yoga gift shops. This is an art to meditate on from a visual perspective whatever your spiritual persuasion.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

February 25, 2011

LETTERS PRESSED INTO ART

Bay Hallowell’s small, intriguing exhibition of monotypes, ‘Tick Tock, (R)Evolutions,’ is at Faulkner Gallery this month

by Josef Woodard, News-Press Correspondent

Sometimes, the small library venues like Faulkner Gallery can play host to surprising pleasures, tucking into niches where art blends with various meetings and tutoring sessions. Such is the case with this month’s model, Bay Hallowell’s show of monoprints under the telling title “Tick Tock (R)evolutions.”

As she explains in a statement, “Often I start with a provocative word or phrase and play with the sounds of the words, the feel of them in my mouth, the look of the actual letters, their shapes and sizes, as well as the spaces around and between them.” Voila! The process is revealed, and the evidence on the walls finds a theme at work and a mind at play.

Visual approach is one thing, but the stuff of language is another in this work. Implicit in the artist’s agenda of the series is the profound influence of words and linguistic nuggets in the mind. But there is also the malleability of dealing with the words that run through our conscious mind. Words can be kicked around, even rendered absurd or abstract, in a non-injurious way, as we see here.

Evolution and de-evolution take place in ways both logical and playful over the series, starting with mangled but more or less legible variations on the child-like and symmetrical cliché at the core, “Tick Tock.” The visual aspects of the letters become artistic silly putty, with the letters overlapping and creating compound shapes, as in “Two Tock Tango” and “Lazy Crazy Tock.”

As the series progresses, letters give way to more abstract gestures and recurring motifs, such as arrows, circles and dizzying geometries. In a discernible way, space and cosmic references beckon in the last works of the almost narrative series, ending with the piece called “Beyond.”

This integrated and evolving series of monoprints brings together fragments of language and semi-abstract imagery, which play off of general ideas of time, clockworks and the cosmos, with nods to proto-Modernist styles such as Orphism and Constructivism. That’s not to say, however, that Hallowell leans excessively on the cerebral or conceptual: it’s all in good, brain-puzzling fun.