Last year I wrote a largely supportive but ultimately scathing post about Amy and Monte Zerner's website. While I was very enthusiastic about Amy's enchanted-intuitive process of working with textiles, I was somewhat shrill about the "purchase it now" vibe of the site overall: in this, my words and the site then mirrored each other. I felt then and still feel that the integrity and beauty of her body of work is not served by all the many 'wisdom decks' the art is turning up in.
However, I understand the two are attempting to reach as many people as can be reached to spread a very positive, loving and expansive message. I heard from Monte Zerner personally and he was very kind and level-headed despite my tongue-lashing and urged me to take a new look at what they are doing.
Well. The whole site has been re-imagined. What is wonderful is that they have shared vast amounts of images of her older work, and overall the site is extremely generous and informative. It is leagues different than the site I saw about a year ago. It simply gives more than it asks for.
Please look here to see her incredible art collection and to see how the work has influenced and pollinated art-to-wear.
Sure, overall the site remains commercial and blinky, but the lovely collage border of her art puts the emphasis where it should be: on the body of work, on a unified visual frame. Seeing the art can be a challenge: follow "art" links among the many video/interactive clicks. These many free interactive utilities: readings, videos, etc, share techniques of self-insight and are fun besides.
It can't be necessarily easy deciding how widely to peddle one's art. It seems a real tightrope walk between over-exposure and sharing it with the world, for all artists. The Zerners seem to have decided that if their time on earth is limited this time around, that rather than pump up the prestige of Amy's art by limiting its exposure, they will instead share it was widely and encourage it to be bought in as many forms as possible. Clearly they believe the New Age messages the work convey are equally important to the work itself.
I still love the work more than I do reading about what it means. I love the mystery of letting the images unfold in myself, without prompting, and I believe this unintellectual, non-mental process it is one of the core occult strengths of the art itself. All art, in fact.
But from now on I put my stinger away for the Zerners, I wish them ever-increasing success and continuing joy in their collaboration, and I will always urge folks to have a look at Amy Zerner's enchanted textile art.
Showing posts with label enchanted process. Show all posts
Showing posts with label enchanted process. Show all posts
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Sunday, July 5, 2009
The Zerner Method
I've admired the work of Amy Zerner for many years. She makes pieces of textile art that fuse traditional occult symbolism with multi-layered, appliqued techniques. I love how she basically recycles the scraps and fabric ephemera that have traditionally cluttered women's lives into powerful, resonant talismans. 
Her series of Goddesses were singular for defining the cultural subtext of each Goddess by using textile scraps that reflected each area of the world from which each Goddess came.
That said, for the past ten or fifteen years, Zerner and her husband Monte appear to have concentrated primarily on turning the images of her textile works into twee advice books, tarot card sets and pre-packaged divination systems and peddling them as hard as they can. I find their website with its self-congratulatory, new agey tone and photos taken with celebrities to be somewhat crass...cheesy...undignified. That's how I see it. I ran across their site and was astounded to find how the artwork I have come to love felt so marketed. The deep and resonant tone of the work doesn't align with the promotion of it.
However, I believe Amy Zerner works in an enchanted way with her materials. The following is a description of how she begins a textile piece, and it describes very well the instinctive, poetically resonant state of receptive meditation that one enters when beginning to work. Amy Zerner's enchanted process, from Monte Zerner:
"She begins her complex accretions of fabric with trust in the fragment. She goes to her little trunks or bags or boxes, haphazardly pulling out this little clump of remnants, that wisp of lace, those shreds of metallics and threads. She is performing a ritual act, an incantation, a ceremony that was decided a long time ago, for which she is the medium.
She scatters her pieces in heaps in a ring on the floor. She sits down in the center of it all and waits for the first impulse. The first move will set free the many others that follow. Suddenly she rises and goes like a sleepwalker straight to one of her piles of textile fragments. She picks a piece of iridescent netting, takes up her scissors, and cuts a shape. She has already prepared her "canvas", the rectangular fabric backing with the outer border already sewn in as a frame. She places the first fragment in the middle of the lower portion of the backing.
She does not know what she is going to do next, which of the hundreds of fragments or rags she will turn to, separating it from its own little heap of related pieces (not similar scraps, but pieces related through source or time or some other association). It is all decided intuitively, on the spot, layer on layer, as she goes along. She is not aware of any conscious thinking as she moves from one piece of cloth to the next. She is totally in her own world, at one with her obsession, unaware of anything else going on around her.
She spreads each fragment on the backing, putting this one on that one, this next to that, silently for hours. Gradually, miraculously, images begin to emerge. They are as surprising to Amy as to those watching her work. Generally, she is entirely alone during the process of composition, sitting and rising from the floor, pausing, bending to place this patch and that piece, turning and reaching in the midst of her multitude of bags and boxes.
She moves constantly, unaware of anything else around her, gradually building detail. Many of these fragments are old, precious, and costly. She will risk them for the spiritual treasure she pursues. She has no preparatory sketches. She simply recognizes what happens as it is happening, without really knowing how it happened. It is amazing, even to the artist.
Each work emerges the way Robert Frost, in a letter to Louis Untermeyer, described the emergence of a poem: "A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins with a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn't find it, comes to nothing. It finds its thought and the thought finds the words."
Her series of Goddesses were singular for defining the cultural subtext of each Goddess by using textile scraps that reflected each area of the world from which each Goddess came.
That said, for the past ten or fifteen years, Zerner and her husband Monte appear to have concentrated primarily on turning the images of her textile works into twee advice books, tarot card sets and pre-packaged divination systems and peddling them as hard as they can. I find their website with its self-congratulatory, new agey tone and photos taken with celebrities to be somewhat crass...cheesy...undignified. That's how I see it. I ran across their site and was astounded to find how the artwork I have come to love felt so marketed. The deep and resonant tone of the work doesn't align with the promotion of it.
However, I believe Amy Zerner works in an enchanted way with her materials. The following is a description of how she begins a textile piece, and it describes very well the instinctive, poetically resonant state of receptive meditation that one enters when beginning to work. Amy Zerner's enchanted process, from Monte Zerner:
"She begins her complex accretions of fabric with trust in the fragment. She goes to her little trunks or bags or boxes, haphazardly pulling out this little clump of remnants, that wisp of lace, those shreds of metallics and threads. She is performing a ritual act, an incantation, a ceremony that was decided a long time ago, for which she is the medium.
She scatters her pieces in heaps in a ring on the floor. She sits down in the center of it all and waits for the first impulse. The first move will set free the many others that follow. Suddenly she rises and goes like a sleepwalker straight to one of her piles of textile fragments. She picks a piece of iridescent netting, takes up her scissors, and cuts a shape. She has already prepared her "canvas", the rectangular fabric backing with the outer border already sewn in as a frame. She places the first fragment in the middle of the lower portion of the backing.
She does not know what she is going to do next, which of the hundreds of fragments or rags she will turn to, separating it from its own little heap of related pieces (not similar scraps, but pieces related through source or time or some other association). It is all decided intuitively, on the spot, layer on layer, as she goes along. She is not aware of any conscious thinking as she moves from one piece of cloth to the next. She is totally in her own world, at one with her obsession, unaware of anything else going on around her.
She spreads each fragment on the backing, putting this one on that one, this next to that, silently for hours. Gradually, miraculously, images begin to emerge. They are as surprising to Amy as to those watching her work. Generally, she is entirely alone during the process of composition, sitting and rising from the floor, pausing, bending to place this patch and that piece, turning and reaching in the midst of her multitude of bags and boxes.
She moves constantly, unaware of anything else around her, gradually building detail. Many of these fragments are old, precious, and costly. She will risk them for the spiritual treasure she pursues. She has no preparatory sketches. She simply recognizes what happens as it is happening, without really knowing how it happened. It is amazing, even to the artist.
Each work emerges the way Robert Frost, in a letter to Louis Untermeyer, described the emergence of a poem: "A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins with a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn't find it, comes to nothing. It finds its thought and the thought finds the words."
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