Suzanne
Ulrich
Copley Society of Art
158 Newbury Street
Boston
October 23-November 15
By Gwendolyn Holbrow
Suzanne Ulrich’s thirty small mixed media collages feel like messages in a bottle, washed up from some distant shore. She uses timeworn paper ephemera, including French correspondence, a Venetian ticket stub, cigar box labels, and pieces reclaimed from the body of work she lost last year in a studio fire, recombining them with other papers in simple geometric shapes. Some are painted over with gouache, pastels or buttermilk paint, which she then abrades back, exposing deeper layers of color and text, or she may cut a window in one paper, exposing a few words on the paper below. The prevailing colors are pastel, mostly whites, yellows and muted blues, with the occasional dash of red. Each collage is mounted on white 12 x 9” paper, floated on a white mat and framed in a white shadowbox.
The work has a vaguely maritime feel, perhaps due in part to Ulrich’s two residencies at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The blues, whites and yellows are sunny seaside colors, while the patterns of squares, circles, stripes and triangles are reminiscent of a ship’s signal flags, re-imagined in weathered Caribbean colors. The veiled text and ambiguous symbols suggest forgotten conversations, words unspoken and messages never received. What is left unsaid becomes more important than what is clearly stated. Like a travel-stained leather valise covered with fading stickers from far-away lands, Ulrich’s collages are a stimulant to the imagination and an invitation to dream.
