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Willa Cosinuke is a painter from Boston, Massachusetts, currently living in Montana. Her newest exhibition, Split Studies, is marked by an interest in painting without a brush, leading her to explore bleach, stains, dyes, and stamps. Her work concerns the surface of things: a sheet of paper, parted hair; the bleached silhouette of a tree. In Wings, that silhouette falls onto the canvas like a shadow, a faint, almost photographic index that recalls Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature.
“How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!” Talbot wrote in 1844, “Surely some effect must result having a general resemblance to the cause which produced it.” For Talbot and his camera, the world was all that appeared. The light which reached down through the trees, stretching its fingers to draw across his salted paper, reproduced there the truism of self-portrait: a tree looks like a tree; a doorway, a doorway.
Yet Cosinuke shows us that the world and its shining objects are nonidentical even to themselves. In her paintings, outside and inside are joined not as physiognomic positives but as arguments, puzzles. Appearance glows and dims; likeness rises and falls. The scalp-line depicted in Split Study is also a ribcage, a pair of lungs, the veins in a leaf, the branches of a tree; the horse’s mane in Parting, blowing grass. In The Rip, a piece of paper considers how best to represent itself: an image of the world splitting open to disclose its own coming to fruition.
This sense of indeterminacy, of emergence, is not just the truth of an image but the very “fabric” of its perception, Cosinuke’s work implies. In the past, she began her paintings on small, singular canvases, and added interlocking panels as she worked. In Split Studies, she begins on canvases already shaped, pieced together from terry cloth, velour, and velvet, to present the surface of the world as a joinery of cracks and edges through which objective experience, fleeting and faltering, transmits. Seen from behind, the curving, jigsawed stretcher-bars resemble mysterious girders—the plumbing beneath appearance.
As the eye buzzes across these hybrid canvases, trying to puzzle the competing styles, referents, and panels into a coherent whole, we are reminded that the subject is not the author of its own experience. Vision is a collaboration with the world. In the experience of beauty, subject and object unsettle and re-make one another, joining together in an act of mutual self-abnegation that lasts just a moment before the actors must return to their roles, and to themselves. For Talbot, this process of intersubjective becoming was given its lie by his faith in the truth of appearance. For Cosinuke, this lie is the surface of the world: beautiful and confused.
Jackson McGrath