Shelter: Helen O’Leary and Liliana Zavaleta

April 23 - May 22, 2022
View online exhibition here

Exhibition essay by Paul D’Agostino

The word ‘shelter’ itself shelters much suggestiveness. It evokes notions of basic forms of cover or protection, conjuring images of simple structures, perhaps improvised or temporary. We might think of thatched roofs, lean-tos, several posts topped by a board or tarp, ramshackle cabins, makeshift huts. Implied are outer presences of greater or lesser menace – weather, beasts, other people, the vast of night – but ‘shelter’ still seems open to the elements. A slight shift to ‘sheltered’ helps to close it off verbally, quieting the rains, blocking the winds, hiding us better, offering a heightened sense of safety. Yet another verbal shift, to ‘sheltering’, gives us a word that sounds like a sequence of syllables settling themselves into assembly.

Many such notions of cover, protection, practical constructions, safety, and pragmatic uses of spartan means are among the conceptual factors in Shelter, an exhibition of artworks by Helen O’Leary and Liliana Zavaleta. In their mixed media sculptures and works on paper, both artists broaden these basic concerns to address how and where we take shelter, seek shelter, find shelter; why we shelter things, ourselves, others; when we shelter from, shelter in, or shelter under. How does all this relate to personal history, belonging, memory, identity, and community? What is it about certain places or dwellings that allows us to call them ‘home’? If life leaves us not knowing where we’re truly ‘from’, or where we’d really call ‘home’, then what does it mean to feel pangs of homesickness? How might our essential experiences and concepts of shelter inform our views on politics, economics, and citizenship?

Resourcefulness, repurposing, rebuilding, recycling, reworking, relocating, and reconfiguring have been constants in Helen O’Leary’s life and work since her early childhood. The artist persevered through much hardship and toil growing up on a farm in a remote setting in Ireland – where she somehow found her way into art and, despite all odds, was able to nurture her passions to pursue it – and she still keeps a home and home-studio there. She maintains both in Jersey City as well, and she has rebuilt and renovated all of these structures, in large part by hand, from whatever materials were already in or around them, conserving their good bones and letting nothing go to waste. Indeed, the discarded items of others have often become her building materials. Decades of work have gone into these dwellings and workplaces, and sufficiently complete as they are, they’re never not still under construction. For O’Leary, there’s always something to be removed, reused, repositioned, or reconsidered. Somehow or somewhere, there’s always more work to be done.

So it is with her artwork as well. O’Leary crafts new works out of older works in her studio, and she ‘shops’ around for materials not by heading to a supply store, but by scoping out her environs for scrap wood, metals, sticks, fabrics, strings, wires, rods, hooks, tethers, and all manner of other media. She even makes her own pigments from things like eggshells and homegrown plants, applying her patently earthy, naturally rich colors as egg tempera. Her constructions, from quaintly small to imposingly large, are puzzle-like, curiously balanced, malleably angular, ostensibly provisional, grounded and poised, yet somewhat hovering and weightless. They are mesmerizing objects of pleasantly great complexity wrought meticulously from material simplicity – and they are indeed sculptures, at least apparently. Nonetheless, since pictorial considerations never leave O’Leary’s mind, she refers to these constructions as sculptural paintings. They might sit atop tables or shelves, or spring up from the floor, but they might also be at least partially wall-bound. Appearing at times like free-standing, buckled and bric-a-brac maps, or like structural components sectioned out to stand on their own, or as conserved remnants of shelters past, O’Leary’s works, the yields of an inexhaustibly active studio ecosystem, invite endless scrutiny. To be sure, in her ceaseless pursuit to always create something new out of things that were something else, or served other purposes, before, O’Leary herself scrutinizes her works endlessly.

Born in Peru, and now living and working in both Chile and the US, Liliana Zavaleta has long wrangled with conflicted feelings about where she’s really from, and where her real home is. In her life and studio practice alike, she’s always examining those same notions to question how they inflect our senses of identity as individuals and within communities, and to ponder ideas of belonging. Where do we belong? What does belonging even mean? Do we belong to people or places? Do they belong to us? Is anything besides our bodies and minds truly ours? Those most certainly belong to us, after all, don’t they?

The relative boundlessness of such existential questions leaves them bound to remain relatively unanswerable, but Zavaleta shelters herself from greater uncertainties by unraveling all such thoughts in her artwork. Long interested in maps, and intrigued by their topographical representations of geographical features and shifting political boundaries, the artist has created an extensive series of works on paper by culling and reworking pages from a vintage atlas. In what she calls Atlas Drawings, Zavaleta intervenes in, around, and atop infographic maps, charts of various sorts, photographic inlays, and stretches of text with now heavy and opaque, now lighter and translucent forms of a generally geometrically abstract sort, all rendered in harmoniously composed acrylic palettes. Her painted forms sometimes seem to respond to their subtexts, but that might be merely incidental; just as often, her fresh forms and vintage surfaces jar with one another, lending the old cartographic pages new layers of depth, dynamism, and curiousness. Closely related to her works on paper both visually and conceptually, Zavaleta’s recent sculptures, variably titled Shelters and Constructions, present as simple, humble, smallish buildings, or as remnants of larger ones. The artist constructs them out of repurposed commercial packing materials of brick-like shape, sometimes wrapping them in burlap before painting them, then mounting them together in more or less ‘balanced’ manners. Exhibited in small groups, these works immediately imply something about community, localized identity, belonging. When seen individually, they register as endearing structural characters, or as pieces of larger structures that stood before, and their colors, textures, and implicit histories become evidence of endurance and structural integrity. Zavaleta’s paintings and sculptures furnish her viewers with a groundwork for considerations of belonging, and offer them visual foundations of places to feel settled, sheltered, ‘at home’.

The word ‘shelter’ shelters much suggestiveness regarding notions of house and home, safety and security, community and identity, ownership and belonging, space and memory, and dwelling in and living among. Bringing together artworks by Helen O’Leary and Liliana Zavaleta, the exhibit Shelter, explicitly or implicitly, shelters all of the same. It welcomes viewers to cross its threshold, as it were, and make themselves at home, settling themselves into assembly. 

Photos by Paul Takeuchi