Uncommon Connections

As a young mother, sculptor and collage artist Roxana Alger Geffen was a figurative painter, intent on capturing the likenesses of her infant children. It was the beginning of a long journey that would take her into the realms of abstraction, exploring the “systems of the family.”

“I was painting my 18-month-old and was pregnant again so I soon had two small babies. I was making a work about them but it wasn’t enough to paint a one-year-old. I found myself not trying to just capture their likeness but what it was like to take care of two small creatures.”

She struggled with her mission. “It felt wrong not to make it look like them,” she related, “but I was spending all this time making shapes so I was not paying attention to the picture as a whole. I started incorporating other images, pasting pictures on the surface.

“When you paint (figuratively),” she explained, “you use different painting tricks to create a space where the figures exist. When you start adding collage, it undermines the illusion of depth and it becomes structurally more complicated—and, for me, more pleasing. What I was interested in was family systems and not individuals.”

It was her first tentative step into the world of abstraction, one that would eventually lead to her exploration of different themes as significant as racial injustice and feminism and as gentle and contemplative as how everyday objects can make sense of a traumatic physical world.

“I’ve gotten used to incorporating lots of materials,” she said. “The materials have always felt alive to me, animated, and they became stand-ins for figures.”

The results sometimes come as a surprise even to the artist. She may start with two elements that excite a thought or emotion. “I look for items that are related but often in a peculiar way,” she explained. “I’m interested in bringing things together that often don’t go together and seeing if I can make them work together. I’m interested in trying to create a certain kind of friction. Ben Street in his book, How to Enjoy Art: a Guide for Everyone, talks about the vibration you get when you put contrasting colors together—he calls it an optical buzz. I feel that’s what you get when you put objects together that don’t belong together.”

When she steps back from a piece, she is often surprised to discover what she has created. “When I am working with the materials it seems so abstract but when I step back I might find it is so obviously a person or some other thing.”

In her current show at The Cornwall Library, Life and the Memory of it: Collages and Assemblages, which continues through August 18th, Geffen presents a collection of framed works on paper (collages) and sculptures (called assemblages when made with found objects). Each of the pieces, in her words, “contains a new world, a landscape pulled into being through my collaboration with materials.”

Geffen says, “The works in my show also try to make everyday pieces of the past newly vivid and alive. My pieces are full of the past: bills paid, things bought and used, fabric torn, litter dropped. I collect these things from my daily life: scraps of cloth, receipts, envelopes, snippets of text, metal things I find on the ground. I assemble them into groupings, pulling them into an uneasy community of misfits. To me, these collages and assemblages each contain a new world, a landscape pulled into being through my collaboration with materials.”

Oddly, it was not until after she had created the pieces in the Cornwall Library show that she found its unifying theme and title: “Poem” by poet Elizabeth Bishop, in which Bishop discovers a dollar bill-size landscape painting in a steamer trunk. As she looks at the details—the houses, tiny steeple and tinier geese—the painting evokes memories of the place, and her memories make the painting vivid and rich.

“‘Poem’ does feel like the genesis of the work,” she said, “but I didn’t know about it until I was looking for a title for the show. A friend knew the work I was doing and sent me ‘Poem’ and it was perfect, evoking a feeling of things that are well-known and dusty and contain a residue of us.”

“I have made work for shows with a thematic starting point,” Geffen continued, “but it doesn’t usually weigh that heavily. I try not to think about context and meaning when I’m working. If I think about it, it tends to get kind of smug. My work usually evolves from materials that I think have some kind of connection, then there is always a layout that I get excited about. But when I start to attach them, things change—and sometimes just die. My goal is to end up with something that feels complete and where everything is necessary.”

The Cornwall show grew out of her appreciation of collages created by the late Duncan Hannah of Cornwall who sold his work at the annual Rose Algrant Show. “They look delightfully casual,” she said, “but they are structurally interesting and complicated. I got very interested in the process.”

In January of this year, on a trip to Mexico, she tried her own hand at collage. “As I did them, I was even more impressed with Hannah and his fine balance. There is tremendous tenderness in his work toward the materials and the kind of life the materials had before being turned into a collage.”

Geffen will share the joy of creating collages Saturday, August 5th, from 10 AM until noon in a workshop at the library for up to 25 adults. The fee is $25 per person and registration is required at cornwalllibrary.org.

Participants are encouraged to bring their own scraps, any small things that seem interesting to them and that can be reasonably be glued or stitched to a piece of paper. Instructions, base paper, some materials, needles and thread, glue and scissors will be provided.

Geffen, daughter of author Roxana Robinson, is a descendant of Roxana Foote Beecher, mother of Geffen’s great-great-great aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe. She has been a presence in the Cornwall community since childhood. This family tradition of activism has manifested itself in her art in many ways.

“Growing up with this history of moral activism was an inspiring tradition even though it was a tradition of white privilege” she said. “There was the process of negotiating how to come to terms about the duality of it. I grew up with sense that we are all required to take action when action is needed.”

But, when she was in college in the early 1990s, she reports that activist art was not endorsed, leaving her conflicted about how to “make work that had some kind of message and (and still avoid) not being taken seriously as an artist.”

Temporarily, she satisfied herself by making small paintings “as kind of an act of resistance” while others were working monumentally and painting females “as a subject, not an object.”

She found peers dismissive of her work about families and family systems so she doubled down. “If I said I made work about children, I would get, ‘Oh that’s cute,’ but saying my work was about family systems, I would get a response of, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ It does not sound like much but I definitely felt drawing attention to motherhood and talking about it was taking a stand.”

Her stands soon became bolder. She noted that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had greeted the 2016 election of Donald Trump by wearing her “dissent” collar as a political statement.

“It was a statement of resistance through accessorizing,” she said. “I was so struck by it that I started making things that went around my neck and posting pictures on Instagram. They were sometimes gestures of my feelings of impotence as a private citizen, a statement of my frustration. They were made of all kinds of materials, often uncomfortable, because, after all, collars are objects of control—dog collars, slave collars—you collar a criminal. I would listen to the news, get enraged and make a collar. People were really into them and they have been shown in two fairly significant group shows. Two are included in the show, The Notorious RBG, which is now in its final stop in at the Jewish Museum in Washington.”

After that, she became more overtly activist and political, producing textile pieces with text on them. And after the killing of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor, she wove the words “Black Lives Matter” through the low metal fence around her home.

As Covid contracted her life, she focused more and more on everyday objects, as she tried to make sense of a physical world “that at that time was such a tremendous challenge.”

“It’s been a very calming kind of practice to deal with nothing more than how do these two things go together,” she said, “to create something funny and beautiful that delights me.”

Geffen now lives and works in Washington DC and for more than two decades has exhibited her work nationally and internationally.

The Cornwall Library is located at 30 Pine Street; 860-672-6874.