by Christopher Crosman
KATARINA WESLIEN: “I Forgot to Remember”
View from entrance to the installation at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine (through May 4, 2025)
Katarina Weslien’s installation, “I Forgot to Remember,” at the Maine Center for Contemporary Art (CMCA) through May 4th is reminiscent of a contemporary stage set where the actors are also the audience, and the set speaks to both formal abstraction and a densely layered narrative. Like Vsevolod Meyerhold’s c1922 Cubo-Constructivist set for his Moscow production of Fernand Crommelynck’s “The Magnificent Cuckhold,” Weslien’s austere yet multi-tasking components are in conversation with each other; soliloquies included. Cone, cube, plane and linear elements intersect, coalesce and interrupt through multiple themes, variations and historical associations. A large, open-frame tubular-steel cone visually funnels viewers into the gallery space where a black cube rises from a corner littered with small remnants of clothing and fabric scraps, readied for recycling and re-use. Mysterious, free-standing panels create a central tent-like space or open room-within-a-room structure, while a thick hemp rope, like a line-drawing, meanders along the floor of an otherwise blank wall, attached to a bronze ship’s bell mounted some twenty feet above. Disparate elements connect while remaining starkly independent. Somehow familiar, there is an initial impression of remembrance, a space of collective consciousness and universal dreams.
It took the artist two years of experimentation, planning, and fabrication to compose her installation, fitting its various components comfortably within the gallery’s expansive white space. The gallery’s geometric classicism, designed by award-winning architect, Toshiko Mori is complicated by shifting natural light. In Weslien’s tip of her cap to Mori, each component of the installation addresses precise proportion and careful articulation of the space with complex forms placed in a three-dimensional composition, like a Cubist sculpture of both geometric and organic components.
Detail, left “Broken Soldier” jacquard tapestry. Detail, right “i forgot to remember this is the time of monsters” Laser cut and painted felt letters with emergency blankets in background. Photo Katarina Weslien
Weslien’s installation at CMCA does not so much occupy the large open gallery space as redefine and re-design it. Calm, light and openness prevail. Narratives emerge around ideas of shelter, passage, and human interaction. The artist was raised in Sweden and her work evokes something of the spare, understated directness of the sometimes darker, northern poetic sensibility. Unlike the work of Edvard Munch, the screams are contained, even muffled as she engages with interior thoughts and mythic voices.
For her installation work, the artist chooses among mostly found materials—often garnered from chance encounters on long walks traversing Maine, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, India and elsewhere during her peripatetic career of teaching and study. Subtle grays and organic earthen colors soften and integrate different parts of the installation, and simple, precise, and time-consuming techniques are utilized to fabricate her carefully balanced environments. Her early interest and training has long featured a wide variety of making and working with textiles, a medium long associated with “women’s” art throughout recorded history. That said, the exhibition wears its feminism lightly, like a comfortable shawl woven by Weslien from ancestral memory.
The CMCA installation integrates various materials and techniques including tapestries woven in Belgium on jacquard looms. Jacquard looms, widely considered precursors to modern computers, sequence warp and weft, weaving decorative as well as story-telling imagery—unicorns, floral patterns, Knights and ladies. In the late Middle Ages tapestries were commissioned to literally warm palace walls along with proclaiming their patrons’ prestige and opulence. Here they articulate a sense of contemporary story-telling where beginning, middle, and end are linked but also separate, disconnected.
Images on Weslien’s tapestries range from children’s shadow puppet figures of a dog or wolf to an upside-down man on a stool next to newspaper columns culled from an actual printed page–also upside-down and illegibly reversed, a mirror-image of the original newspaper or printed source material. One of the three jacquard loom panels, “Upside Down Man” is covered with small, needle felted dark grey and blue patches—like dirty snowflakes or volcanic ash strewn across an empty landscape. These patches interrupt representational coherence and illusion while unifying the seemingly unrelated panels. The needle felted patches bring back the machine-loomed panels to handwork, with the tedious repetition and irregularity of one-stitch at a time individual labor and touch.
Detail “Upside down Man” jacquard weaving with blue wool needle felting. Photo: Luke Eder
Oculus on Styrofoam flotsam. The “Upside-Down Man “tapestry (middle right) is seen in the distance, through and reversed by the orb to an upright position. Photo: Luke Eder
A third tapestry, titled “Broken Soldier,” features an image Weslien photographed in Calcutta, depicting leftover debris from a heap of discarded mythological effigies, much of which is of unidentifiable origins. A nearby clear glass oculus is glued onto an egg-shaped object made of storm and sea-battered Styrofoam that has been stained a yellowish-ochre by lichen. The artist found the industrial object washed ashore as flotsam from the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. The attached glass orb serves as an oculus for viewing the upside-down imagery of the nearby tapestry. Possibly ignored by adults, the orb is at eye-level for small children. The orb reverses and turns the “falling man,” or as Weslien describes him, the Upside-down Man, upright recalling a child’s toy, along with the still largely illegible newspaper text. Are shadow puppets, optical illusions, odd scraps of oceanic flotsam and flipping puppets especially meaningful to those recalling a lost capacity for child-like wonder or childhood itself?
Hand Shadow, jacquard tapestry, cotton, wool, silk and viscose fiber on aluminum structure. 144” x 108” with hand-sewn patches. Photo: David Clough
Another wall panel appears to be about deconstructing language. This panel holds long black strips of flat, interlocking, block-like felt letters. The individual letters are opaque (black-painted felt), approximately six-inches tall and individually laser-cut. Like an oversized charm bracelet, each strip repeats the phrase “I forgot to remember this is the time of monsters,” a non sequitur from a phrase attributed to the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Now is the time of monsters, indeed. They are roaming throughout an installation of hanged letters, upside-down men, illegible newspapers, detritus, rags, and a giant, metal-framed cone, like a never-to-be filled cornucopia. Gramsci is among myriad artists, past and present, philosophers, comparative world religious traditions and history informing Weslien’s deeply layered, vastly intelligent and pointedly ricocheting artworks loosely gathered from over five decades of her long, thoughtful practice.
“i forgot to remember this is the time of monsters” Lazer-cut felt letters in foreground; mylar emergency blankets in background with sandbags weighting the metal “tent” external frame. Photo: Luke Eder
It is telling that Weslien likes the strangeness and visual sensation that the backs of the tapestry panels provide, first encountered by visitors entering the gallery, like abstractions— Franz Kline or De Kooning paintings (that sometimes included buried newsprint images). Only upon entering the enclosing “tent” space composed of free-standing panels do we understand that each of the four corners of the tapestry room are connected by the artist’s disparate memories of travel, childhood, pilgrims’ progress through sites of man-made and environmental disruption and disaster. My own associations turn on the seemingly eclectic mixture of images and materials throughout the installation—shredded piles of textile remnants perhaps recalling the pulsing tens of millions of participants gathered together for ancient religious festivals. There is the strangeness of other gods, the multiplicity of humanity held in place by reason of loosely shared belief systems. For Weslien, she is consciously, “thinking more about migrating people who are on the move because of political and environmental reasons, making do as they find whatever is at hand.”
Detail: from behind laser cut felt letters of “i forgot to remember this is the time of monsters” toward tapestry panels, Upside down man (left) “Hand Shadow” (right) and entryway to gallery. Photo: Luke Eder
Along an adjacent wall behind Weslien’s “tent”, silver mylar emergency blankets are loosely hung. These (including a gift for visitors) are often carried by emergency caregivers at scenes of natural and/or man-made disasters. In the gallery the movement of visitors triggers light breezes causing the mylar sheets to gently ripple and reflect abstract flashes of ambient color amid blurred reflections of visitors’ clothing and bodies and nearby elements of the installation, a temporal element of accidental movement, unpredictable consequences of the seemingly slightest human interaction.
Across from the main gallery entrance—at the diagonally opposite corner of the gallery entrance-a cushioned, black-felt walkway on the floor abuts the length of the gallery’s back wall. This felt path is flanked along its entire length by a floor to ceiling, 25-foot-high mesh net. This massive, segmented laser cut felt net is composed of several large sections hand-knotted together. It provides a loosely gridded screen between the felt footpath and the back gallery wall. For Weslien who has long studied Buddhist philosophy, this netting may also allude to Indra’s net, hung at the world axis between Buddhist and Hindu religions. Also known as Veda’s net, Indra’s net is a metaphor for concepts of emptiness, independent origination, and, perhaps, most tellingly, suffusing and holding all worldly matter and energy. Indra’s net is often described as the “perfect interfusion,” each interstice containing reflections of all the stars of the universe including its own infinitude. Like the mylar blankets, the net breathes visitors’ shadows of random movement against the back wall.
The slightly raised and cushioned felt walkway evokes rites of spiritual passage and physical change, from hard, gallery flooring to the slightly raised and softened pathway providing a subtle shift in bodily awareness signaling change. In past installations Weslien has recalled her varied walks through Kurdistan, the Hindu Kush and to the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers where millions gather every dozen years to wash away the world’s and their individual sins. Yet, here she is “…thinking more about migrating people who are on the move because of political and environmental reasons, making do as they find whatever is at hand.
Black felt cushioned walkway toward 10’ x 10’ felt room. “Indra’s net” flanking walkway on left. Photo: Luke Eder
In her poignantly personal installation art—and especially with a consciousness of our own footsteps, perhaps—ideas formed from individual pilgrimage accumulate, are collected, become space for memories of travel, both physical and in remembered dreams. The interior of the black exterior cubical-shaped room is equipped with beige blankets hung on the interior walls. Small red crosses are hand-stitched and scattered, seemingly randomly across each of the interior blankets. The red crosses are meant to document real and metaphorical “repairs” for tears and holes in the fabric. Light yellow outlines appearing to stain the cream-colored blankets are faintly stitched to outline the wear of the blankets over time. Made in rural Nova Scotia, these simple, warm blankets were once hand-woven from left-over wool clippings. The small, white interior of the felt room is designed to be a place of memory, silence, and meditation. Weslien thoughtfully provides small head pillows sewn onto the softly cushioned floor of the room. The artist notes, “The material of felt absorbs sound. This 10’ x 10’ structure is covered inside and out and covers the floor with felt for that very purpose. I hope that as you cross the threshold, you feel the shift, a haptic shift…” Quietude is real and literally felt.
Felt room interior, wool felted walls and floor with hand woven and embroidered antique blankets. Photo: David Clough
Piled under and next to the cubical chamber, small pieces of ragged, unidentifiable clothing and fabric simultaneously convey waste, regeneration and uplift— reminders of Buddhist and Hindu belief systems as well as an urgent ecological necessity. The room visually rises on loose textile scraps, lifted above the gallery floor. There is a material promise of softening comfort, of healing and shelter.
Shredded textiles surrounding the exterior of the black felt room
The ship’s bell installed at the end of the installation, that visitors are encouraged to ring, signals a warning alarm but also the passage of time. Weslien’s ship’s bell distantly evokes New England’s formative and often mixed nautical history of ships carrying displaced, ever-hopeful immigrants and its oft forgotten role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The isolation of the bell mounted out of direct reach and above the installation might also recall lives lost at sea. Her installation as a whole opens doors, raises questions, and sounds warnings. The bell’s attached rope lies coiled along the floor, bending and curling back on itself like the Chinese Zodiac’s “Year of the Snake” (2025), a reminder of both abiding beliefs and contemporary concerns. The “snake” shifts, a bell sounds, marking time with each pull on the rope. Dancing shadows, the coexistence of lost rituals and new technologies of marking and making, describe ambiguous, fleeting reflections where movement and change offer infinite possibilities for individual aliveness and awareness of the planet’s abiding beauty. For the attentive viewer, the installation and its ringing powers of quiet contemplation are impossible not to remember.
Christopher Crosman
April, 2025