Local artists see, hear ‘ touch with new exhibit

During a normal day at the 707 Penn Gallery tucked in Pittsburgh’s Cultural District, a plucky… During a normal day at the 707 Penn Gallery tucked in Pittsburgh’s Cultural District, a plucky pillow said, ‘It’s colder than a witch’s titty.’ But how can a pillow, an inanimate ball of fluff, be quoted? Welcome to ‘Visible, Audible, Tangible,’ the recently debuted free exhibit of Allison Compton and Liz Ashe, on display until April 10. On the floor of the single-room exhibit sits a grid-like layout of light-blue throw pillows, each about one square foot in size and resting on a pair of high-heeled shoes. Though mild in color, these pillows are anything but when it comes to the phrases with which they’ve been branded by Compton. Embroidered with unapologetic black thread, expressions of simile and hyperbole run amok, rooted in a tradition of Southern flair. Walking the perimeter of these sassy shrines to culture and words dubbed ‘Southern Sayings,’ viewers are bombarded with lighthearted and familiar phrases. ‘Throw pillows are the perfect means to demonstrate how we throw around expressions. It’s only when we’re out of our environment that we become aware of the constructs of our language,’ said Compton, who grew up in Richmond, Va. Some of the sayings are so embedded in our culture, it is hard to remember where we first heard them: ‘Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in awhile.’ Then there are those we wish we could stop remembering: ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.’ Compton said that the display draws from the old wedding adage, ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue and a sixpence in her shoe.’ Two pairs of the shoes used for the exhibit are old, from the 1950s, 28 are new and 10 pairs are borrowed, while the pillows fill the blue requirement. The artist said she also included a sixpence in the piece. Nearly floating above the words that bounce from pillow to perspicacious pillow are even more words, constituting the second part of the exhibit, created by Ashe. Two parallel shelves adorn the side walls, lined with wrinkled up papers that echo a sort of abstract origami feel. Covering the papers are 86 poems scrawled in black ink by Ashe, taken directly from her own personal journals. These are poems she hopes to use in her thesis, as she is a graduate student in creative writing at Chatham College. This display was inspired by the crumpled paper found in a box of chocolate that Ashe received in the mail from a friend. ‘The crumpled aspect intrigued me, and I sewed the crumples … with medical suture thread,’ said Ashe. ‘I chose medical suture thread to make a reference to the body and wounds, rather than to sewing. The poems are very much a picture of my life, and as such they are a body.’ Ashe sewed the thread in patterns shown to her by a doctor. She said that she felt the crisscrossed lines of suture thread goes nicely with the poems as their thickness looks ‘more like an ink line’ than that of regular thread. Though the papers make a visual display all on their own, some gallery visitors may want to get up close and try to read through the crumples and thread. ‘I sutured them in such a way that someone can’t just pick one up and read the entire poem, which is how I played with the accessibility of the pieces. Editing is a disjointed process that is not read by an audience, and I hope that the sculptures relay that with creepiness and curiosity at what can’t be read,’ said Ashe. She said that her goal was to make each of the pieces look like one of her journal pages, ‘complete with rhyme schemes, additions and cross-outs.’ ‘ ‘If a phrase was ever in a poem, and I had record of it, it went onto the vellum. I wanted to show the poetry editing process in a visceral and not fully accessible way,’ she said. The parallel between the two components of ‘Visual, Audible, Tangible,’ according to Ashe, is that they both ‘highlight a physical comfort or discomfort with words, as the title of the show implies.’