Linda Ekstrom at Frumkin / Duval - Santa Monica - Brief Article

Art in America, May, 2002 by Leah Ollman

Religious faith is both a dominant theme in Linda Ekstrom's work and an evanescent force enshrouding it. Her sculptures oscillate between the twin poles of physicality and ephemerality, between knowing and believing. Among the most powerful of her earlier works are those using the Bible itself as raw material. Prayers converts pages of text into a chain of tiny prayer beads to be fingered during ritual recitation and meditation. In another work, Ekstrom cuts and shapes the printed text into a blossoming flower, actualizing its status as both inspiration and emanation. Though she violates pages of sacred text to create these sculptures, Ekstrom resacralizes them in a new form, as vibrant carriers of meaning, more sensually alive to the eye and hand. Defying the fixity of print on paper, she renders the texts both fluid and organic.

In "Castles," another series of altered books, Ekstrom interprets texts on the lives of mystics and saints. She manipulates the legibility of the printed words--abrading pages to tissue thinness, blotting out and washing over sections--in the course of lodging their message in experiential space. Ekstrom has made work in recent years that reasserts the presence of women in biblical history, and invokes the memory of lives extinguished in the Holocaust. The work in this recent show, titled "Beneath Memory," feels more generalized than previous efforts, and yet more intimate, more keyed to the private process of locating and anchoring the self, whether in terms of faith, history or geographic locale.

Memory, like faith, migrates among the gut, the fingers and the mind. Ekstrom evokes that sense of a power permeating consciousness but eluding capture through her exquisite facility with materials of comparable sensual appeal and physical elusiveness--wax, feathers, light and shadow. In the series "Invisible Cities," Ekstrom weaves weblike fragments in thread and silk. Mounted an inch or so from the wall, the pale, irregular grids cast shadows equally gray and vague. Both the objects and their shadows read like remnants of memories, maps divested of their place names and particularities. In another work, Ekstrom hangs a pair of white, elbow-length leather gloves from a delicate silver chain. On one of the gloves, she has photo-transferred an image of a dense flock of birds, and on the other, a map without words. Flights of the body and the soul conflate in these works. Migration becomes a matter of both shifting locales and raising consciousness, literally lifting the self to a higher plane.