Elizabeth Langer refuses to be put into a box, and her exhibition at the Edgartown library through July 31 brims with an arresting variety of abstract and figurative prints and collages.
Langer titles her show “Into the Wilderness,” saying, “My work emerges from the unconscious, a kind of wilderness or uncharted territory where I often encounter the unexpected. How else can I explain the coexistence of my dual focus on figurative work and abstract collage?”
Wilderness as a metaphor for uncharted territory can apply as well to Langer’s decision to leave her impressive law career to pursue art full-time in 2008. She writes on her website, “As an attorney for many years, I was bounded by the law and the rites of lawyers. My arguments were paced, my briefs were thorough, and my advice was fully reasoned. Chaos had no place in my life. Transitioning from the rational and measured life of law to the intuitive and unbounded life of art was a trip through messy, uncharted territory.”
The first piece we encounter, “City Dawn,” plays with the tension between order and more dynamic movement. Langer divided the large piece of hot-press watercolor paper with artist masking tape into six squares. She then painted a vigorous composition of solid colors and thick, sweeping black diagonal lines on top. When dry, Langer removed the temporary tape, thus creating a white “window frame” that locks the underlying image in place.
“B’Midbar: In the Wilderness” is another striking six-square grid collage. By happy accident, the artist masking tape ripped off some of the paper when Langer was removing it, after laying down the acrylic background. She found the resulting irregular shapes, rips, and rough, torn edges enticing, and a new technique was born that, in its unpredictability, has a touch of the “wild” to it.
Langer’s versatility is evident in her purely hard-edged geometric collages, such as the long horizontal collage “Labyrinth No. 19.” She peppers the two abstract, almost creature-like forms with silver hex nuts, strips of painted heavy paper, and striped black and gold fabric swatches left over from her couch. “No scrap goes unnoticed in my studio,” she assures.
Where “Labyrinth No. 19” is quiet, “Ode to Dance” vibrates with the energy brought to mind by its title. Langer’s arrangement of colored paper, including the spiral edge from a notebook page, “dances” off of the rippled, corrugated cardboard background.
Langer comments, “The collages are pure joy. They give me freedom to explore and experiment with shape, color, composition, and found objects. I scour the sidewalks, trash bins, and shelves of hardware stores, incorporating joint tape, hex nuts, nails, corrugated cardboard, newsprint, paper towels, and scraps of metal into my work.”
But Langer hears the siren call of the figure as well, which she has been drawing since childhood. “I am fascinated by humans in all their complex emotions — grief, wonder, resignation, love, and strength. I am equally fascinated by the expressiveness of the human figure — in repose, in contemplation, in dance, in conflict, and in sorrow.”
She gives us an enigmatic woman in “The Pleasures of Her Place,” a large mixed-media collage with acrylic, papers, charcoal, and oil pastel. Full of lively gestural marks and texture, Langer keeps precisely what the “pleasures” are and the specificity of “place” just beyond our reach, thereby engaging us in deeper looking and contemplation of what we are seeing.
“Yellow Dreams” is an inviting monotype in which we seem to be head-to-head with a woman lying down. She has wrapped her right arm under her chin and then up and over her head in an impossible position, cocooning her appealing countenance in a self-loving embrace. The bold simplicity of the black-and-white figure surrounded by the yellow background carries echoes of Matisse. “I was just having fun, and did it very quickly,” she says.
A very different print is “The Mothers of Beslan,” where grief is tangible. Inspired by a newspaper photograph, Langer depicts a line of five anguished women after their children were killed in a failed rescue attempt when they were taken hostage by Chechnyan terrorists in 2004. Living in Jerusalem at the time, she used art to help process the horror.
Speaking of her art overall, Langer shares, “My work comes from whatever inspires me.” She hopes viewers leave “Into the Wilderness” with joy and curiosity: “My figures display many different emotions, and the collages keep me happy. I have to do that. It’s like interval training. You work hard, and then take a break.”
Elizabeth Langer, “Into the Wilderness,” at the Edgartown library through July 31. For more information, visit elizabethlanger.com.
