Judith Schaechter at Memorial Art Gallery
by:
Kendall DeBoer
Published in May, 2020 in the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Issue 3 of Cornelia was virtual only.
Judith Schaechter, The Battle of Carnival and Lent, 2010-2011.
Eve is an origin. Biblically speaking, she’s the first woman to exist. As the original woman, she commits the original sin: at the behest of Satan-as-serpent, she eats fruit forbidden by God in exchange for expanded knowledge. Part of her punishment is the pain experienced while giving birth, her womb serving as a new site of origination in bearing children. Beyond the Judeo-Christian Book of Genesis, Eve serves as an originary archetype for deviant women. Curious and transgressive, condemned and reclaimed, Eve is the basis of countless cultural representations and interpretations.
It is fitting, then, that a representation of Eve hangs at the entrance to The Path to Paradise: Judith Schaechter’s Stained Glass Art at the Memorial Art Gallery. A vertically oriented, luminous diptych draws in the viewer. In the top stained-glass panel, a pallid figure in fetal position floats, suspended in a dark, navy-blue space. The bottom is teeming with colorful, fantastic, otherworldly flowers. The wall text for The Birth of Eve (2013) warns the viewer against confusing the biblical Eve with Schaechter’s, “who heads—guiltless, Adam-less, and full-tilt—toward her own lusciously imagined Garden of Eden…an image of maximum sensual and aesthetic beauty.”
Schaechter’s adaptation of Eve signals the paradigm shift that characterizes the exhibition more broadly. The work conjures mythological and art-historical references while simultaneously questioning, destabilizing, transforming, and departing from tradition. As the first major survey of Schaechter’s expansive artmaking practice, Path to Paradise includes more than forty of her stained-glass panels. In each, she repurposes longstanding techniques and potent iconographies to suit her contemporary, idiosyncratic, feminist ends. The Birth of Eve prefigures the exhibition’s many sites of encounter in which Schaechter, the divine creator behind this re-envisioned Eve and the fantastic world she inhabits, intermixes low and high, past and present in form, content, and interpretation.
Judith Schaechter, The Birth of Eve, 2013.
The singularity of stained glass as a medium is one of the most striking qualities of the exhibition. As craft scholar Glenn Adamson notes in the exhibition’s (stunning, expansive, unprecedented) catalogue, “stained glass has had many glory days, not least in the Arts and Crafts era of the nineteenth century, but for most people it is indelibly associated with the Middle Ages.”[1] Stained glass and contemporary art do not often overlap. Even stranger is the combination of stained glass and Schaechter’s post-punk, new wave sensibility.
The Memorial Art Gallery showcases the artist’s extraordinary objects with bright, LED-illuminated light boxes custom-fitted to each glass panel. The brilliant, shimmering quality of their glow is difficult to recreate with photographs. While walking through the exhibition space, visitors overhear Schaechter speaking via an installed video (available online) in which she characterizes stained glass as “enlightenment embodied.” As she describes her relationship with glass—her process, her techniques, her materials—she remarks on the power of her secular stained-glass windows casting radiant light. “Stained glass shines colored light onto your body; it’s a powerful experience.” Her statements echo the earliest discourses surrounding the medium, such as the French Abbot Suger’s twelfth-century conception of “lux nova,” or new light, to describe the heavenly aura cast by windows in Gothic cathedrals.
Judith Schaechter, The Path to Paradise, 2020. Installation view: Memorial Art Gallery.
Schaechter’s voice provides a lively soundtrack that animates the exhibition. Her words cascade, creating a variety of entryways into the work. The exhibition also includes several quotes from Schaechter printed as standalone vinyl elements that illuminate and inspire as they indicate the large scope of her practice. Hasbro’s Lite-Brite, a toy that enabled Schaechter’s early and ongoing love of light and pattern, is just as relevant as Suger’s lux nova. Panels of wall text inform visitors that Schaechter embraces digital tools, too, and is an avid user of Photoshop. On the also-illuminated, window-like digital screen of her computer, she scales, manipulates, and develops her scenes before translating them into colored glass. The exhibition provides its own screens to engage audiences: child-height, glowing light-boxes with translucent collage pieces, a digitized copy of one of Schaechter’s sketchbooks to flip through, and a touch-screen activity that asks participants to reimagine The Battle of Carnival and Lent (2010-2011).
Curator Jessica Marten aptly identifies “unruly women” as a recurring theme throughout Schaechter’s oeuvre. Subversive, bold, provocative, her gendered figures defy patriarchal norms that reduce a woman’s role to either the chastened virgin or promiscuous harlot. Schaechter at once references art-historical precedents of archetypical women while flipping, reversing, and remixing them. In My One Desire (2007), Schaechter replicates aspects of a sixteenth-century tapestry series in which pure, virginal maidens cohabitate with mythical unicorns. A dead unicorn lies across the lap of Schaechter’s gaunt, topless, androgynous, central figure, recalling the pietà of Christ and his mother. The object label indicates these references and even includes an image of the tapestry. Schaechter’s work activates audiences’ prior encounters with women in art history only to destabilize them. This woman is neither the pure Lady from the unicorn tapestries nor is she the Virgin Mary. Schaechter presents viewers with something more complex.
The seductive, sexualized vixen undergoes transformation throughout the exhibition. Schaechter offers reinterpretations of Venus, the classical goddess of love, beauty, sex, desire, and fertility in multiple works. In Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (2004), Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (ca. 1485) collides with Hokusai’s woodcuts of Octopus erotica (1814). Schaechter’s resultant work reconfigures the supple, curvaceous bodies of its sources into a big-eyed heroine with a disproportionately large head, draped in a net-like, transparent garment. Across the exhibition space, Virtue Triumphs (When the Devil Sleeps) (1991) reimagines Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (ca. 1545) with contemporary characters indulging in sexual encounters and various excesses.
These are only a few of Schaechter’s unruly and non-normative women on view at the Memorial Art Gallery. Schaechter has been called a “post-punk stained-glass sorceress,” which makes sense; after all, her works challenge viewers to rethink gendered iconography through enchanting environments teeming with magic and grotesqueries. Beginning in this exhibition with The Birth of Eve, Schaechter’s stunning stained-glass amalgamations take on centuries of mythology and art to provide viewers with new points of origin, replete with the complexity that marks this moment.
Judith Schaechter, Virtue Triumphs (When the Devil Sleeps), 1991.
Kendall DeBoer is a third-year PhD student at University of Rochester in Visual and Cultural Studies. She specializes in 20th-century American art with an interest in surrealisms, craft, and self-taught makers. She also works as the 2020 John Wilmerding Intern in American Art at the National Gallery in Washington DC, where she assists in a curatorial project on modernism and woven forms.
Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester
500 University Avenue
Rochester NY 14607
[1] The Path to Paradise: Judith Schaechter’s Stained-Glass Art (Rochester: RIT Press, 2020), 3.
