Exhibition Review: Commemorations: Vita Plume

Reviewed by Pat Hickman and Gail Hovey 

New Brunswick Museum  
Saint John, Canada 
June 9–September 9, 2019 
Visit exhibition page here

Commemorations, the title of internationally known artist Vita Plume’s exhibition, brings to mind history, remembrance, honor, and loss. Entering the quiet exhibition space, one is surrounded by the work of one of New Brunswick’s most respected contemporary conceptual visual artists. Plume’s sophisticated, elegant, complex work, her careful research, and her deep understanding and compassion for others are visible in the images she has created. 

Born in Montreal of a Latvian refugee mother and father, Plume’s powerful early work, Rescuing The Fragment (1991–1992), consists of two related pieces and draws on her Latvian heritage. Plume was given a valued, worn, traditional drawn threadwork linen blouse, made in the mid-1930s in the Lielvārde region of Latvia and brought by family members to Canada in the early 1950s. In the first piece, Objects of Ethnicity, the blouse itself is covered with text, using lines from Barbara Kirshenblat-Gimblett from the book Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Smithsonian Books, 1991). The linen and text (on Mylar) are pierced with rows of straight pins, rust bleeding onto the white of that tattered, beloved blouse. Despite loss and dislocation, the past remains present for immigrant refugees, however altered and unreachable. 

If Objects of Ethnicity is grounded in an actual garment, its companion piece, From Folk Art to Fine Art, is grounded in the absence of the same garment. In the first work, the text is on the cloth; in the second, text creates the shape of the absent cloth, a silhouette image of the blouse. In this conceptual piece, the text is in three languages—Latvian, Russian, and English—from the book Latvian Tapestry by Sandra Kalniete (no imprint, 1989). Again, specimen pins, suggesting museum collections and the preservation of objects, pierce the words. Though Latvia is much more stable politically now than when the piece was made, From Folk Art to Fine Art continues to speak to enduring heritage, ideas overtaking objects, complexity increasing through ever expanding distance. 

The exhibition contains seventeen works, almost all of subtle woven shibori, of dyed cotton and polyolefin, handwoven on a digital TC-1 loom. Five of these are based on portraits by photographer Doris Ulmann (1882–1934). While teaching in Raleigh, North Carolina, Plume collaborated with Berea College’s archive collection of Ulmann’s images of almost forgotten women in Appalachia. The five portraits comprising The Doris Ulmann Project (2011–2012) include Woman Making Basket, honoring an anonymous maker and her textile-craft practice; the woven form is a completely different textile technique from basketry, visually bringing the two worlds together.  

In other works on display, Plume honors Nel Oudemans, one of New Brunswick’s textile mentors, and Alice Lusk Webster, a remarkable woman who was instrumental in creating the New Brunswick Museum’s Arts and Industries Department in 1935 (the museum is the host for Plume’s exhibition). Plume’s narrative series portrays glimpses of Webster from infancy to maturity, communicating and commemorating her through thorough research and brilliant, technical woven expertise.  

Finally, it is impossible to avoid the penetrating eyes of Fallen Soldiers (2010–2011),a monumental wall of eyes, each with the soldier’s initials in the lower corner. Woven on Plume’s Jacquard computer-assisted loom from digitized photographic images of the eyes of men and women who were sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, the eyes are open, not closed as in death. She’s asking that we know these soldiers individually and collectively, that we feel discomfort in these rows that bring to mind markers in military cemeteries. Her wall stands and stretches as silent witness, looking back at us, forcing us to pause, to question, to acknowledge the unfathomable loss and the devastation of war.  

In this memorial monument with its seemingly endless repetition of eyes confronting the viewer, Plume’s title for her solo exhibition is most poignant and powerful as it speaks of loss and remembrance and honor. 

This exhibit is accompanied by Commemorations: Vita Plume, a 32-page, generously illustrated catalogue published by the New Brunswick Museum with excellent essays by Roslyn Rosenfeld and curator Peter J. Larocque. To order the catalogue contact the New Brunswick Museum Boutique: (888) 268-9595, (506) 643-2334 or Boutique@nbm-mnb.ca.

Pat Hickman is Professor Emerita of Art, University of Hawaii; Past President of TSA (2008–2010); pathickman.com. Gail Hovey is an editor and writer.