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Although the painter is an exquisite
techinician who celebrates color and design, the power of her
highly original work unfolds in the subconscious. She develops
a heuristic yet playful visual language of form by combining
her painted canvases with three-dimensional elements such as
wooden protrusions/extensionss, curving and spiraling wires (often
continuing a painted line), Ping Pong balls, and letters of the
alphabet. With this vocabulary, she creates images rich in architectural
and design elements, references to language, and cosmic, cultural,
and somatic symbols that touch on many movements in art such
as Constructivism, Cubism, Surrealism, Art Deco, and Abstract
Expressionism. In Orbit, Intervals, and Submerged,
fragments of memory, dream, and visceral sensations seem to drift
up through the beautifully painted blue-green surfaces to find
avenues out into the cosmos along painted lines and wire pathways.
These surreal fragments flee like phantoms that do not dwell
on the plane of consciousness, yet one senes that the awakening
of the body's cellular memory is symbolically embedded in each
work.
Although a joyous playfulness pervades
this colorful exhibition, there is poignancy as well. Coming
to Meet, a shaped canvas with stripes of many shades of red
bordered by a black field and overlaid with a tangle of golden
lines, seems to reveal the violence, pain, and misunderstanding
in our world. The tangled lines appear to be new additions to
Maki's evolving vocabulary. They seem to echo Pollock's drips,
yet one suspects that they may also resonate with Klee's notebook
sketches of the cosmos.
Looping lines and the use of red
are more comforting in Interlock. Wooden struts painted
black and red extend the canvas so its structure resembles that
of a Japanes screen. Red on the inside surface of the struts
gives one the feeling of the sensual silk lining of a kimono.
The painting is a labyrinth of lines overlaid with small rectangular
"windows" that open, perhaps, into a world dof hope
and "revolving possibility." Interlock, like
all of Maki's poetic paintings, brings to mind Rilke's words,
"Through every human being, unque space, intimate space,
opens to the world..."
SUSANNA CARLISLE
THE magazine MAY 2002
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