Siri Berg By Dominique Nahas (1999)
Siri Berg, “Green,” 1999, Collaged Japanese woodblock prints, 24 1/4 x 48 3/4 in (61.6 x 123.8 cm)
Siri Berg's paintings, collages and assemblages are refined objects that presume to question, not answer, the role and place of perception and the hand in the making of contemporary art. I think it would be fair to say that the artist purposefully interjects a remarkably high level of positive ambiguity within her visual inquiries. This approach, mixed with equally intense levels of probity and genuine devotion to the transformative potential of materials, produces work with exceptional compositional crispness and emotional lucidity.
The rise of the digital revolution and its cybernetic intervention in our daily lives is a subject that Berg embraces whole-heartedly in her work. At the core of such artworks is a wonderment at our capacity and drive to touch others with our urgent incapacities to fully express the incommensurate chasm between reason and felt sensations, what Wallace Stevens described as " ... a war between the mind ... And sky, between thought and day and night."
Techno I, 1999, for example, is an assemblage utilizing what the artist terms "an extinct CD" along with art papers placed within a plywood box. In another intimiste 12"x12" assemblage entitled Mouseballs, 1999, the ubiquitous key board companion's center of gravity is in the form of six hard, putty-gray spheres mutely dominate, totemlike, the pictorial stage of her composition.
In both of these elegiac and quietly moving works Berg dramatically uses the rhetorical visual device implacing residues of the "techno-imaginary" in her assemblages upon the surfaces of her hand-made papers and delicately painted surfaces. This interplay of "ready-made" computer detritus and the exigencies of the hand infers a dialog between the resources of language circumscribing the contours of extended consciousness as well of creativity and identity. What is central to all of the artist's work however, is an awareness of the texture of reality as a factor at once for the enriching and for the limiting of experience. As in Stevens' poetic ruminations, so too Berg's imagery is about a recording in some measure of the sensual flow of perceptions that allows reality to come into view and which enables us to be informed by it and to partake in it as well.
This texturing of the world and its encodings on us and our consciousness on it suffuses all of Berg's work. Passages with lambent tonalities and smooth, lithe surfaces in her Bars, Straight Lines and Project One series, 1997-99, for example, are oftentimes placed in direct oppositions to her "confected" passages of thickly applied paint. At other times the surfaces are flattened yet saturated with luminosity, each evanescentally sequential arrangement tenderly knitted together using Japanese woodblock prints on silk. The pictorial and compositional interplay suggests a measuring and apprehension of the very richness of the perceptive act that differentiates the clearly from the dimly perceived, the real from the imagined (and the difficulty of separating one from the other).
Siri Berg transforms texture, color and structure in her shimmering visual transcriptions to send signals to the observer that our sense of the immediacy of the world can be shifted, through design, for the self to disengage from the world. Grounded in the physical immanence of materials and light yet suspended in such a way so as to gain a new threshold of experience, Berg's creative work allows perception to slow down in a joyfully protracted search for vitality and movement.
"I give in a controlled way ... " remarks the artist, and indeed the economy of Siri Berg's plastic organization and the richness of her surfaces through the application of intarsia, overlays, laminations and mixtures of wet and dry paint skins forms a coherent vision of the world. Here, in Berg's work, the emotional and the rational co-exist passionately and harmoniously together. And here again integration is where the poetry of the world's polarities is reflected.
Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic working in Manhattan. He writes for many publications including Art in America, Flash Art, Art on Paper and Artnet Worldwide. Mr. Nahas is on the editorial board of Review magazine arid Is one of its regular contributors. He is also the New York editor of dART International, a leading arts quarterly.