At Glass Curtain Gallery, collagist Monika Plioplyte finds meaning in dissonance.
"You Are a Circle Expanded" at Columbia College's Glass Curtain Gallery presents Lithuanian-born American artist Monika Plioplyte's most recent explorations in print, collage, paint, and video. Nestled between two pillars at the center of the gallery, You Are a Circle Expanding, 2024, instinctually reads as informal textile architecture, with several layers of cutout prints and photographic forms constituting the warp and weft of its templelike body. Baltic paganism and Lithuanian folklore inform Plioplyte's color palettes and symbolism, as wheel-like patterns, ornate starbursts, and geometric florals -- signs of ritual craft and history -- come into proximity. The artist employs mythological narratives, the work of the hand, and the female body to present unfamiliar and forgotten patterns in daily life, enveloping and arresting the viewer who seeks a way in or way out of understanding cultural hybridity.
"You Are a Circle Expanded"
Through 2/14: Mon-Fri 9 AM-5 PM, Glass Curtain Gallery, 1104 S. Wabash, students.colum.edu/ssac/galleries/glass-curtain/you-are-a-circle-expanded-monika-plioplyte
Plioplyte's solo exhibition makes it clear -- the dedicated printmaker and seasoned collagist is now a sculptor coming into her own. I asked about her impetus to create patterns with images of her body, which appear as recurring motifs in I for Nested Pattern, from 2022, where the artist tenaciously postures against barren agricultural landscapes, cloaked in cutout paper armor. "I use my body as it's readily available and one of the few things I have the exclusive, honest rights to," she says. "Patterning cutout prints of my body, I can reach a point of complete abstraction, helping me disconnect from the constant emphasis on my identity as a woman in relation to this world."
In the central artwork, decorative red and black ink wood carving impressions of an antique wooden spindle (acquired from Plioplyte's mother) are interwoven with yellowed lacquered risograph prints of photographic negatives of the artist's body. Radial anatomical snowflakes hang in chain links, their delicate extremities submissively bend and curl at the edges. Her body, shot from a low angle, foregrounds her lithe legs, arms spread skyward, her head titled back. In another silhouette, Plioplyte is seen splayed, legs and arms at 90-degree angles, her gaze pointing up in amphibious precision. Overhead, beige-gold streamers accented with thick and smaller daubs of paint snake through skeletal lineation. Conjuring an ethnic sub-context, the beholder is entangled in the aftermath of a celebration, public ritual, or perhaps the remains of informal architecture cast off by forest nomads.
Moving from Lithuania to Brockton, Massachusetts, with her family in 2001, Plioplyte was forced to bridge worlds through language. Moving between cities, schools, and communities, she grew habituated to constant change, communicating with civic authorities, bank tellers, and grocers on behalf of her parents. Living as both child and caretaker of immigrant parents, self-portraiture serves as a mirror of inner and outer worlds. We discuss shared sentiments as women immigrants never fully existing here nor there. Displaced in our foreignness, both in our home countries and the adopted one, we speak about the complexity of living between languages and the power of not distinguishing between written and symbolic forms. Plioplyte turns to "layering" as a strategy, pointing to a series of freshly minted monotypes from her time at Vermont Studio Center in 2024. Plioplyte's quick compositional judgment is palpable; subtle signs of rotated screens and gestural pulls of architectural and anatomical fragments in washes of sunset yellow-orange, stone greys, forest greens, and Baltic blues, hold multiple meanings that unfold in succession. Presented as a series of nonlinear abstractions, they mirror the fluidity of language and interpretation in folkloric storytelling. "The Lithuanian word for 'pattern' is raštai," she divulges, "which interchangeably means paper, writing, letter, and document." Inviting the viewer to experience the simultaneity of meaning-making and protective concealment, Plioplyte transposes viewers to a psychoanalytical landscape of flattened bodies emerging from chiaroscuro.
A black-and-white composition, Grandma's Table, 2024, is composed of overlapping white crocheted doily impressions that form a pattern upon which a cuprous esophageal figure erupts. Several metallic copper flying fish torpedo onto a lectern while a minute baby crowns from in between lungs, its mouth affixed to a tiny kidney-shaped respirator. Ragged and delicate, mending and multiplying her grandmother's handcrafted doily suffused with a life of its own, Plioplyte nods at her inheritance of labor and generational storytelling. I recall my own grandmother laying a table, each table mat, napkin, and piece of cutlery finding its own particular order, and think of her as an everyday collagist. Forming an aesthetic arrangement within a certain number of finite steps, with systematized intervals of form, a new pattern is birthed.
Plioplyte is quick to interject, "I'm not seeking to create aesthetically pleasing forms, rather, I'm interested in what disturbs." Cohosting experimental punk, electronic dance, and noise shows with her husband, musician Jonah Rapino, at the underground space Wolf Village, in Little Village, Plioplyte's anarchist tendencies form a thorough line in work and life. Using discarded materials and cut forms, and borrowing, stealing, and rearranging personal archival materials, Plioplyte goes as hard in envisioning her works as she does in a crowd of headbangers. That's an oath the artist makes to living at the fringe.
A volatile collage, Homage to Birds (That My Cats Ate), 2024, relies on a hastened moment of disfigurement. Cut and painted paper shards spread across four horizontal carved black paper panels, where doily forms and bloodied cut-paper feathers collide, breaking out of frame mid-chase sequence. "I'm inspired by death because it's scary for so many, yet it's everywhere around us." Plioplyte describes her processes as intuitively chaotic, "I like not being in full control of the work. There are other forces helping in the process -- a printing press, a stencil lying here, a print there, previously used painted swatches; I can never fully predict what's going to happen. There's a lack of control when I search for elements and that really works for me . . . otherwise, I can be a really controlling person!" In a superfluous relationship with photography, painting, and printmaking, Plioplyte perceives endless possibilities as material elements come together/fall apart in the act of building each composition.
Visiting family after the long separation of a global pandemic, the artist left her multipanel works mid-creation, returning only to find an image of a bird appears when seen horizontally. The condition of cultural displacement and the temporal disjuncture that follows is bona fide, as the immigrant experience of placelessness forces a shift in cognition, allowing for quick and nimble material decision-making. In contrast, familial heirlooms reify deep time, indicating the cross-infiltration of time, materials, and processes. Plioplyte clarifies, "I think of myself as a collagist first. I think contemporary artists are tired of being put in a box. No one wants to be just a printmaker, just a ceramicist, or just a painter. Everyone wants to put you in a box. The white cube is a box. Your identity is a box. What if, instead, we pulled from everything? Collage lets you break the box, to rebel, to see what falls apart and comes together in a space that's unresolved."
Caught between articulation and disarticulation, between visual symphony and experimental noise, Plioplyte's practice finds meaning in dissonance, emphasizing the infinite constellations of inner worlds through pictorial montage. Embracing the unknown in response to the finite expectations imposed on her body, Plioplyte's works exist in both sleeping and waking worlds, expressing a double life much like early women surrealists or mythological enchantresses, hidden in plain sight.