Kirsten Stoltmann: 1R gallery

A certain fantasy of the American Southwest as barren, inhospitable, timeless, stony, and impassive--Mars with sagebrush--has lengthy held a grip on the American imagination. Kirsten Stoltmann, who lived in the Midwest before her novel relocation to California, assesses and reinforces this mythography with the fascination of an outsider. For her video projection Renegade (all works 2003) Stoltmann literally embedded herself in the denud landscape, using a hidden armature that suspended her horizontally between, say, sum of two units outcroppings or two boulders. In a series of stretch outed meditative not-quite-vignettes, she appears amid the desolate cleanse as simply another feature of the landscape. the pair of and not of her surroundings, Stoltmann appears to flutter or levitate and occasionally, as the camera leisurely pans in or without slowly raises an arm as if in a trance. This near rigor mortis functions as a ritualistic homage to the eerie strangeness of the West and to our spiritual or meditative associations with it. Female figures within that history are rare; perhaps this is single reason Stoltmann arrays herself as a kind of androgynous Western every-person in a white shirt, black jacket and pants, and r bandanna. To say that in the extremity this video contains suggestions of the kind of holistic magic and mystery single encounters in the sleuthing novels of Tony Hillerman, for example, is no criticism of Stoltmann. There is a suggestive and spooky quality to the spaces of the West, an extraordinary faculty of perception of aloofness, and her video takes upon and furthers this enigmatic allure while reflecting upon it as a cultural obsession.

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The present to view also included four carefully adorned tumbleweeds. These plants are sculpt through nature--uprooted, they roll and make revolve around the landscape, simultaneously dead and mobile, wind and stone abrading them into rough, circular shapes. Stoltmann festooned her prickly spheres with bits of stuff--chips of turquoise, feathers, silver ornament, fragments of colored cloth--of the kind Native Americans might have engageed to (superficially) similar ends. It is as if the tumbleweed picked up bits of its human cohabitors as it bounc along. There is a touching earnestness to this--a gesticulation of honor and acknowledgment combined with a surprising and fortunate gravitas.

Seemingly unrelated to these other works is I Have Something To take an account of You, a larger-than-life-size photograph of a vagina; a purplish amethyst that itself has a longish furrow within it has been inserted into the vulva. The stone acts as a cap or stopple and also as a kind of adornment, marking the aperture with a colored crystalline diadem Here, as in her other work, Stoltmann takes a cultural sign and from one side a poetic intervention both confirms and reach outs its position as a matter of import, as an icon awarding revisitation and reconsideration. These issues matter to Stoltmann, and in a mature and considered way she invites them to matter to us.

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