Shawna Miller and Maria Teicher: "Arms Full"

Text and photos by Mark Elberfeld

In Oslo this past fall, a city whose arts scene is outwardly dominated by the male bravado of Edvard Munch and Gustav Vigeland, I found the contrasting intimacy of Shawna Miller and Maria Teicher’s debut duo show an intense but welcome relief.

While the relatively new metal-clad Munch Museum dominates Oslo fjord at thirteen stories and Vigeland’s oversized sculptures depict humanity in its overwhelming array of configurations in the capital city’s centrally-located eponymous park, Miller and Teicher’s show occupied a more domestic space and scale. And that, according to Paulina Ree, was the point of putting this show together in the first place. “This particular show was even more important than I initially envisioned, as women’s stories are still looked down upon. Domesticity, often disregarded as fine art, and the mother figure —because only as a religious subject matter has been considered — are so important.”

The Munch Museum dominates Oslo fjord.

Joining forces also for their curatorial debut, painters Miller and Teicher grapple with the dual sense of the phrase “arms full” as it relates to motherhood. In their distinct ways, both artists capture the ephemerality of motherhood in contrasting but complementary styles: Miller in figurative painting that captures several mothers with their infant children and Teicher through smaller scale, painstaking flower paintings and haunting Polaroid transfers. While Teicher’s works overtly suggest the fleetingness of life as momento mori, Miller’s close-cropped bodies emphasize in the compressed space of her canvas that the baby is an extension of the mother; in these early moments of life, they are tightly bound.

Teicher’s Polaroid emulsions suggest erasure, rebirth, and foreboding.

Appropriately enough to Ree’s point, “Arms Full” was mounted in the basement of a gingerbread-style house now converted into a design studio in Oslo’s leafy and homey Frogner neighborhood. At the time of the gallery opening, the house served as home to Female Artists Oslo, an international community of women and gender nonconforming artists established by Ree, herself an artist, whose primary focus is creating space in the art world for those who are typically excluded or brushed aside. Furthermore, Ree is Miller’s sister-in-law and and has loved her work for many years. Miller connected with Teicher through Instagram and felt that their work, while vastly different in style, and tone, would create the perfect conversation around motherhood in art and art in motherhood. Over the opening weekend, Miller cracked a joke about the power of Instagram, which she uses prolifically herself, and the crowd chuckled knowingly.

Ree, Miller, and Teicher during the artists’ talk. Teicher’s work is upper left; Miller’s upper right.

But in the inhabited (real) world of this event, the charming, domestic feeling of this show, I would later reflect, is a bit deceptive. While I found it easy to simply walk out of a gallery in the Munch museum, or to keep walking in Vigeland Park to get away from the looming sculptures, I found that I couldn’t turn away from Teicher’s eerie Polaroid transfers or Miller’s psychedelic underpaintings. The space itself — and subject matter — was too compressed for that; they demanded attention. During the opening reception, it was difficult to focus on chit-chat; the wall of Miller’s classically rendered tondos interspersed with Teicher’s flower paintings pulled me in and distracted me from the small talk in the room. But there was also space for humor. Teicher said that her small round flower paintings went well alongside Shawna’s breastfeeding paintings “because they kind of look like nipples.”

Miller’s tondo “Louve” (left) and Teicher’s smaller round “Zusammen” (right) establish a conversation between the artists and their works.

Not that engaging with Miller and Teicher’s art was always funny or easy. Darkness pervaded, at least upon first glance, especially in Maria’s finely honed, meticulous flower paintings, the backgrounds of which are mostly rendered in grey and black. “Grey was all I could see,” she said, of her postpartum experience. Small bursts of color, she’d say, burst back into her world as she recovered slowly after giving birth to her son. Her husband brought her a rose during that period, and color reentered. In these hauntingly beautiful paintings, likewise, color sneaks through in the guise of bulbs and petals. The titles of several paintings echo the imagistic depictions of parenting. “The Children Are Always Ours,” for instance, shows a closed yellow bulb resting close to, but not touching, a separated, splayed petal in all its glory. It blossoms so beautifully next to, but not attached, to its “parent.”

Shawna’s paintings, in contrast, employ a vastly more varied palette, but there’s a deeper message beneath these vivid colors. Along with many “completed” oil paintings, she chose to exhibit several kaleidoscopically vibrant underpaintings, which the casual gallery goer wouldn’t usually see. To me, they suggest the multiple possibilities of mothering. Simply put, so much of the chaotic, frenzied work of motherhood goes on behind the scenes, and it is wild back there. “Coherence” and “Entanglement” stand out to me for their dizzying vibrance. They radiate the energy of a brain on overdrive. Those titles, like “Bound State” and “Wave Function,” come from the language of quantum physics. Shawna jokingly said that’s all she knows about that particular field, but the titles work in tandem with their accompanying images for their sheer poetry.

These paintings might be poetic, but they also do indeed carry the heft of quantum physics. The arms are full of responsibility and love. Regarding her process of painting skin-on-skin contact between mother and child, Shawna has shared her discovery beneath the surface: “I lost my own parents at age fourteen, and my paintings of holding, and being held, became a way to excavate the grief and loss of connection that happened thirty years ago.”

Miller’s “Nola” demonstrates figural compression and a tight emotional bond.

As one woman comparing two of Miller’s works at the artists’ talk said, “You’re also showing some of the many choices we make as mothers: This infant breastfeeds while this one is on formula, perhaps. One wears a cloth diaper while this one wears a disposable one. Sometimes those choices aren’t even a choice.” Furthermore, the mother added, “We should stop judging each other and support each other instead.”

Over the weekend spent in the gallery with Miller, Teicher, Ree, and the art they created and curated, I came to view “Arms Full” not just as a gallery opening, but almost as a happening of sorts, a place for fellow mother-artists to grapple with their duality reflected on the walls and with each other in conversation. It is clear that these two women support each other as fellow artists, mothers, and friends. They have extended themselves to each other and their viewers, their arms — and their work — reaching out.

For those who mother and for those who don’t, both artists, and Ree in her hosting this show, lend a vicarious view into motherhood, its beauty and pain.

And we are fuller for it.

A moment in the artists’ talk reinforced the need for this kind of community. Teicher came back to Miller’s joke about all the messages exchanged and friends discovered on Instagram. In a tone bordering on somber, she said to a silent room, “As a working mother, sometimes that’s all I have.”

Gustave Vigeland’s “Monolith” is the sculptor’s homage to the column.