The Great Grid

By Lyz Bly

January 19 – March 3, 2007

Cleveland State University Gallery

In a culture obsessed with "surface" – the nipped and tucked body or one-dimensional forms of entertainment such as reality television and celebrity gossip magazines, for instance – it is satisfying to come across an artist whose fascination with and treatment of the painting surface is paradoxically deep.  Patricia Zinsmeister Parker, whose solo exhibition The Great Grid was on view at the CSU gallery through March 3, skillfully worked magic with paint in a show that was as ambitious as it was visually appealing.  Curated by doyen of Cleveland's art community, Dan Tranberg, The Great Grid was a beautifully arranged exhibition that visually transformed the gallery into a spare, unified work unto itself.

Zinsmeister Parker is known for her colorful, large-scale paintings; she is proficient at mixing and melding vivid reds, teals, greens, and purples, subtly sculpting the paint atop canvas and paper.  The recent work created for the CSU show was, as the title indicates, centered on the grid.  In the modern or contemporary art realm, the grid is often associated with order, angles, and mathematics – one thinks immediately of Sol Lewitt's sculptures or Hanna Darboven's multiply framed narrative drawings.  However, Zinsmeister Parker subverted the grid as much as she paid tribute to it. 

In Heads and Tails, for instance, 21 pieces of paper, arranged seven across and three down, were saturated with textured gloss enamel, each grid unit's own unique site of disarray.  The ground color of each varied slightly, from black to maroon, as the overarching acid green gradated from sheer to opaque.  The artist further undermined the order of the grid by collaging a wonderfully wrought white shape across more than one quarter of the work's surface.  The shape was cut from unprimed canvas; its surface texture beautifully contrasting the sheen of the green enamel.

Zinsmeister Parker's The Barber Shoppe compellingly complimented Heads and Tails, as the former work seemed to defy the one dimensionality of the flat grid by appearing to recede into the wall.  The artist created this illusion by painting simple gray lines and shapes on 16 pieces of translucent parchment, framed at the bottom by a broken border of zigzags lines and dots in black, punctuated by the artist's initials, "PZP."  The gray pigment was lusciously slick, patently opaque.  The trompe l'oeil recession occurred in the center of the horizontal grid, as Zinsmeister Parker placed two additional shapes on parchment beneath two of the outer drawings. 

While most of the work in The Great Grid was categorically strong, Moon over Miami, comprised of ten red and sky blue rectangles on parchment paper, with a hexagon of stretched canvas jutting from and above the top right corner of the grid, was less than stellar.  The hexagon, which extended awkwardly about 12 to 18 inches from the wall, overpowered the composition.  Moon Over Miami seemed to be an attempt to subvert the grid by extending an angled shape into the physical space of the gallery.  Instead, the clunky construction of the shape, coupled with two seemingly out of place female figures, made for a cluttered, even puerile work.  Overall, however, The Great Grid demonstrated that Zinsmeister-Parker's work is anything but; the exhibition revealed paintings that were visually gripping, texturally luxuriant, and, most significantly, conceptually clever.                   

 Article first appeared in Issue 31, March/April 2007