ANDOVER — “Losing Ground” is a six-minute video in which a woman tries and ultimately fails to cross a piece of ground that buckles beneath her feet.
“She’s walking here toward the viewer and then all hell breaks loose, and she’s unable to maintain her stance,” said Gordon Wilkins, Robert M. Walker Curator of American Art at the Addison Gallery of American Art. “You can see almost it’s a comment on the earth fighting back against her body.”
The video was created by American artist Patty Chang, whose work is “often built around very subversive or transgressive acts,” Wilkins said. Chang produced the illusion of moving earth by placing sod on top of a water mattress.
When Wilkins first saw “Losing Ground,” which the museum acquired in 2022, he was immediately reminded of “West Wind” by Winslow Homer, which has been part of the Addison’s collection since it first opened in 1931.
“This is this woman walking along the rocks at Prouts Neck and she looks like she’s about to be blown off into the water, and thinking about the forces of nature fighting against human beings,” Wilkins said.
While “Losing Ground” and “West Wind” depict individual women struggling with forces of nature, they also evoke unique burdens imposed by gender.
The surprising similarities between the works, in spite of their obvious formal and stylistic differences, is why they appear across from one another as part of an exhibit, “Free Association: New Acquisitions in Context.”
“I guarantee you’ll never see a Winslow Homer next to a Patty Chang anywhere else but at the Addison,” Wilkins said.
The show will be on display until Feb. 11, and hangs in nine galleries that occupy the whole second floor of the Addison.
“It was a show that we organized organically, looking at what we’ve acquired over the past five years or so, and then incorporating that, figuring out how works that we’ve acquired speak to work that was already in the collection, so each gallery has emerged organically around certain themes,” Wilkins said.
Wilkins was speaking while giving a recent gallery talk at the exhibit, along with Assistant Curator Rachel Vogel, which was organized by Andover’s Memorial Hall Library.
The pair will give a virtual talk on Tuesday, Dec. 12, at 2 p.m., that people can register for at the library website, mhl.libnet.info/event/8938373. This talk will be recorded and then posted online a week later.
The show itself was curated from the Addison’s 27,000 objects by Wilkins, Vogel and Allison Kemmerer, the Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director at the Gallery.
The nine themes they address are the American West, street photography, queer modernism, Bauhaus artists in America, and Minimalist art.
There are also galleries devoted to themes that emerge in different historical periods, such as the body and nature—where “West Wind” and “Losing Ground” are located—and classical mythology, domestic interiors and light.
“Everything is placed for some reason,” Wilkins said. “We have a logic behind what we do and we try to tell stories, not so much in the text that you read next to an object, but through the placement of objects.”
In the gallery dedicated to artists from the Bauhaus, the German school for art and design that was shut down by the Nazis in 1933, visitors encounter works of art that at first may seem purely abstract.
Bauhaus instruction was based on rethinking the relationship between form and function as a way to improve everyday life, Vogel said, and many of its innovations are still with us in consumer goods that favor “geometry, angularity, new materials.”
Their approach also inspired artists like Josef Albers, who had his first exhibition in the United States at the Addison in 1935, after fleeing fascism.
“He has this theory that color is relative and relational and experiential,” Vogel said. “So we experience different colors, they come forward, they recede, they have a larger presence, they dominate or they come back into space based on the quality of the perception.”
These ideas are at work in a painting at the Addison called “Bent Black (A)” from 1940, which features equal amounts of black and white, although black seems to dominate, giving the composition a dynamic quality.
In a similar fashion, a series of squares made from the same yellow hue appear differently depending on which colors surround them in Albers’ paintings.
“Our perceptual apparatus as a viewer is part of what makes the work,” Vogel said. “We complete the work. It doesn’t stand static, it doesn’t stand away from our experience of it.”
These lessons of Albers get a powerful update in “Homage to the Auction Block” from 2021 by Steve Locke, a recent acquisition at the Addison.
While the composition clearly evokes works by Albers, its central square has an irregular shape that evokes the auction block mentioned in its title, suggesting a historical origin to what may have seemed a purely formal relationship.
“This foundation of what we consider the modern era really comes back to the legacy of chattel slavery in the U.S.,” Vogel said. “The economic advances, globalization, really comes back to the legacy of slavery, and we can’t understand modernism without reckoning with that relationship.”
Locke’s work is consistent with the Bauhaus approach of questioning the relation between form and function, but in this case pursues it in terms of “a conversation with the actual social circumstances of artistic production,” Vogel said.
Further, Albers’ notion of the relativity of perception is something that Locke experiences personally and professionally, as a Black artist.
“He’s saying that this idea of the relativity of our perception is not something that’s just a normal exercise about a fine painted canvas, but it has real implications for how we relate to one another and how we fit in the world,” Vogel said.