On a shelf in my room at my father’s house, a small corked jar holds shreds of grey-green moss, a tiny mouse bone, a splintery piece of worm-eaten wood, and a few smooth pebbles. It was a gift from my friend Leesie to remind me of the walks we used to take as teenagers, when we would examine the minutiae of our lives as well as stray bits of natural detritus.
Painter Suzanne Stryk would probably smile at this attempt to lasso a moment. In her exhibition “The Collector’s Plan,” on view at Second Street Gallery, Stryk explores the human impulse to order and organize the natural world, to detect an underlying design, to contain and master time, birth, death, in a futile but irresistible urge to make the unknowable knowable.
Grappling with such an enormous theme could easily get heavy-handed, but Stryk keeps things light—literally. By using a vocabulary of small things—eggs, feathers, insects, even DNA—she creates a visual conversations that is both intriguing and amusing.
Many of the 23 acrylic and mixed media on wood panels venture beyond the limits of two dimensions. Sculptural bird’s nests or chaotically twining vines provide a reality that overrides precisely rendered yet flat objects, whether mottled eggs or iridescent beetles, that have been compartmentalized and identified. Closer examination, however, often reveals scientific notations ciphered into the surface of the reliefs.
Other paintings work in reverse, with notebooks physically imposed upon nature, Stryk having plastered them, spiral bindings and all, into the image. For the Virginia-based artist, it’s never a matter of either/or; it’s always both/and.
Using earthy ochre and a rich black that deliciously pulls objects into its abyss, as well as jewel-like colors for feathers and eggs, Stryk imbues her studies with an inviting sensuality.
In the 38 x 35-inch “Blueprint,” a textured band of wild-woven ochre nests runs through the center of the painting. Above, small birds perch discretely in the blue-green rooms of an architectural floor plan (one of Stryk’s favorite organizing motifs), while below, inchoate black and reddish-brown winged shapes morph into and out of each other like crows flying against a twilight October sky.
“The Collector’s Plan” also displays Stryk’s personal sketchbooks, in which she exquisitely records what she finds on her own walks. Like the egg at the center of the 38″ x 36″ “The Collector’s Secret,” these are at the source of Stryk’s swirling fine-feathered imagining.
