Barnard professor opens 'Letters From Home'

Joan Snitzer, a faculty member of the Barnard College art department, opened her latest exhibition, “Letters From Home,” at A.I.R gallery (111 Front St., between Washington and Adams streets) on Thursday, Sept. 8. The showcase, hosted at the first gallery in the United States to feature women exclusively, is a multi-medium project focusing on themes of women and home.

Entering the space, one finds a wall of two-dimensional puzzles consisting of jigsaw boxes, some with numbers jotted down in the upper right-hand corners, some blacked out completely, some with tiny paintings, and some with photographs. Both the opposite and parallel walls are white and blocked out into squares with pencil or permanent marker. Three-dimensional shapes, like squares and letters, are contained within the puzzle boxes. Objects rest on the squares, many of which are painted white, but they are still unmistakable as toothbrushes or razors. Framed photographs of turmoil and war, mixed in with personal objects, such as a notebook and vivid paintings, interrupt the starched colors.

The exhibit is a puzzle itself in that to appreciate the depth of it demands concentration. It causes the observer to step closer and peer in, to see the fuzzy faces within the two-dimensional puzzle’s grid, the names jotted down in a notebook, or the familiar lines of a whitened object.

Two aspects of the exhibition are especially intriguing: the role of the objects in a woman’s domestic life and the paintings mixed in with the objects. Snitzer has taken everyday household bottles, like mouthwash or detergent, and painted them white. She explains that this is a way of “erasing product identification and replacing it with gender identification.” One sees not only the object itself rather than the brand, but also what role this object plays in a woman’s home life.

The paintings, splattered combinations of vinyl, watercolor, wash, egg tempera, and, in some, white gold, also lend a sense of a woman’s life. Snitzer recalls how she considered the role of women through history and the development of the “woman’s touch” in the process of each layer. Looking at these paintings, the viewer steps closer in an act of intimacy in order to absorb the splattered colors, the metallic shades, and the layered textures as well as their combined effect.

“Letters From Home” is about womanhood and the expectations surrounding the word, but it also contains highly personal pieces of a woman’s life—the life of the artist herself.