sylvania

I have long been intrigued by female visions of utopia, from Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies to Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, so I was excited to get a chance to see SFMOMA's exhibit of new work by Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret today.  Perret has spent the last decade composing a fiction called The Crystal Frontier in which a group of women form a new society in the New Mexico desert specifically to escape the demands of consumerism.  The story is told through the objects Perret constructs, and the new pieces the museum has on display include ceramic objects supposedly created by the women as well as large crystal-like sculptures of mirrored Plexiglass and a single mannequin (pictured right) wearing a gorgeous dress made of iridescent cobwebbed fabric layered over a nude chemise.  Of course I gravitated right toward the fashion.  I was also quite taken by the wallpaper covering one side of the room that has a bold geometric pattern based on a fabric design by Russian artist Varvara Stepanova.  I definitely felt like the artwork in the gallery was only giving me the tiniest fraction of the story, and the two texts Perret has contributed to the exhibition are mysterious at best.  But I love the idea of Perret slowly letting us in on what she has in her head, piece by piece, though also allowing the viewer to fill in some of the blanks themself.  I want to see more, and I also want to hear her speak when she is at the museum in early February.