Miriam Schaer
Brooklyn,
USA
Miriam Schaer is a multimedia book artist. She uses garments—girdles, bustiers, brassieres, aprons, children’s clothes—as her means of containment. Inside these stiffened, shaped, and embellished enclosures, she conceals books and other objects that document her explorations of feminine, social and spiritual issues. Since 1993, she has exhibited steadily and extensively in solo and group exhibitions, and her work has been mentioned in a long list of articles and reviews.
Ms. Schaer is a 2003 recipient of a NYFA Artist Fellowship. Her work has been included in the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series at Mabel Smith Douglass Library, Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, the oldest and longest-running exhibition series dedicated to showcasing women artists in the United States. Recently, her work was included in From the Inside Out: Feminist Art Then & Now at The Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery, St. John’s University, Queens, NY curated by Claudia Sbrissa. She was also represented in the biennale, Imagining the Book 2007 at the Bibliotheca National in Alexandria, Egypt.
Feminist Artist Statement
For me, Feminism is about possibility, about being able to go places in work and in life that would have been closed to me, had I been born in a different time. Since I grew up in Buffalo, the Albright-Knox, a small jewel-like contemporary art museum, was my playground. I was surrounded by the work of Louise Nevelson, Marisol, Frida Kahlo, Joan Mitchell, and Louise Bourgeois. I saw the Eva Hesse retrospective when I was twelve. Not until I actually interviewed for art school, even in Buffalo, was I told to consider art education or maybe art therapy.
I make sculptural books from clothing: bustiers, toddler dresses, and gloves are all starting points for questions I need to ask. As I became more involved with books, I began to study their history and their forms. I learned about an ancient structure called the girdle book: prayer books worn by medieval monks, lashed to their belts, or girdles, so their prayers would always be at hand. Instantly, I had a different vision. Why girdles? Girdles are binders, like notebooks, places to hold and keep stories. My girdle books contain new prayers and contemplations; new objects of devotion. Working with the girdles has been a process of healing, of learning to love the femaleness of my body and being comfortable in my own skin.
Alongside the girdles, other garment books also have taken shape. I began to use baby clothing because their scale is workable for books, but their significance immediately became apparent. They became receptacles for my memories of childhood: idealized versus painful. These pieces explore issues of childhood and motherhood. My own feelings about my infertility live in work created out of toddler dresses and baby rompers. Gloves and hand-shaped drying forms comprise another body of work that explores the hand as a most basic sign of human communication—greeting, warning, surrender and embrace are all communicated through hand gestures.
In 2001, I began to create environments for these narrative sculptures. Using varied modes of display, the installations are inspired by the dioramas in natural history museums, by retablos, and by altars. These environments draw on a narrative tradition, in which the impossible is probable, in which magic and marvels coexist with things actual and proven, while continuing to ask questions that often have no answer.
Ancient Armor
Ancient Armor is a golden girdle that houses an obscure nursery rhyme:
Lady Queen Ann, she sits in the sun.
As fair as a lily, as white as the sun.
Come taste my lily, come taste my rose,
Which of my maidens have you chose?
Go to the wood and gather flowers.
The ball is ours and none of yours.
Cats and kittens now stay within;
While all young maidens walk out and in.
The facing pages contain images of idealized women peeking through veils of gold paint, longing to leave their places and jump off the page. They are looking to go and yet hiding safely inside the girdle, knowing they can go back to a place of refuge and safety.
Ancient Armor
Ancient Armor is a golden girdle that houses an obscure nursery rhyme:
Lady Queen Ann, she sits in the sun.
As fair as a lily, as white as the sun.
Come taste my lily, come taste my rose,
Which of my maidens have you chose?
Go to the wood and gather flowers.
The ball is ours and none of yours.
Cats and kittens now stay within;
While all young maidens walk out and in.
The facing pages contain images of idealized women peeking through veils of gold paint, longing to leave their places and jump off the page. They are looking to go and yet hiding safely inside the girdle, knowing they can go back to a place of refuge and safety.
Baby (Not) on Board: The Last Prejudice?
Baby (Not) on Board: The Last Prejudice? addresses why so many people are angered by women who choose childlessness. The work is part of an ongoing exploration of our culture’s pejorative views about women without kids. Using red thread to create scarlet letters, I hand-embroidered representative negative comments on baby dresses. The statements taunt and accuse. Gathered from interviews with childless women, online research, and personal experience, the comments are typical of an endless flow of critical statements that seem to be growing bolder, even as non-traditional families are gaining greater acceptance.
The Abandoned Bouquet
Six Wives for the Brothers Grimm was a six-part installation at the Brooklyn Public Library, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY, presenting a re-invention of Grimm’s Fairy tales based on a comparison of themes with the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The installation consisted of six individual cases. Shown here is Case One: The Abandoned Bouquet.
Chapel of Uncommon Prayers
Chapel of Uncommon Prayers is an installation consisting entirely of books and book objects using hand shapes and gloves, and created using traditional bookbinding techniques in a non-traditional way. The exhibition explores the personal relationship to prayer and devotion in a world with increasingly difficult, often unanswerable questions.
Exploring the needs we have to find quiet space where we can meditate on our everyday wishes, the walls of the gallery have been painted a series of rich, saturated colors, to create a place apart, in which we can explore our personal hopes, dreams and desires. The subjects of the books take all forms—the personal as well as the political, from the desire to have basic needs of shelter, nourishment and love, to broader themes of war and world peace.
No Ornament So Precious as the Labor of their Hands (detail)
No Ornament as Precious as their Hands is the altar piece of the Chapel of Uncommon Prayers. Created from gloves I found while walking the streets of New York, as well as gloves sent to me by friends and acquaintances, each was sewn together, as if one page in an enormous book of lost souls creates the twenty foot chain reaching up from the floor to the ceiling. Painting them gold elevates even the humblest and most tattered glove and makes them part of a whole. The three chairs, also painted gold, are for visitors to sit and take a minute to themselves while viewing the exhibition.
Solitary Confinements: A Family Portrait
The family is where we learn who we are, where we begin to figure out relationships and find our way in the world. Part of this involves the stories we tell ourselves to develop a sense of self, and the stories we hide from ourselves because of what they reveal. The interior life of the family and its relationship to our public life are what Solitary Confinements attempts to explore.
Solitary Confinements: A Family Portrait (detail: Mother, Brother
The family is where we learn who we are, where we begin to figure out relationships and find our way in the world. Part of this involves the stories we tell ourselves to develop a sense of self, and the stories we hide from ourselves because of what they reveal. The interior life of the family and its relationship to our public life are what Solitary Confinements attempts to explore.
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