Michele Oka Doner
“The Book of Enchantment”
New York, 545 West 25th Street
Michele Oka Doner’s artistic production spans over six decades, encompassing sculpture, public art, drawings, prints, artist books, and functional objects, all of which incorporate a wide variety of media, including bronze, silver, gold, terrazzo, porcelain, and handmade paper, among other materials. Often referred to as “nature’s scribe,” Oka Doner derives her formal vocabulary from her lifelong study and appreciation of the animal and botanical forms that comprise our natural world, as well as a sustained poetic exploration of the human figure. Whether they resemble bark, tree roots, microscopic molecules, or something human or animal, Oka Doner’s multimedia projects are rendered in a variety of scales that mirror and transcend the world around her. Ranging from the small and intimate to the large and magnificent, Oka Doner’s highly-intuitive works steadfastly seek to both evoke natural forms and pay homage to the environment—in particular, that of Miami, Florida, where the artist was born—while poignantly reminding us of our increasingly precarious ecosystem.
Seduction, 1979 inkjet print on rag paper, ed. of 5 + 2AP 30 × 40 in. / 76.2 × 101.6 cm
The exhibition opens with a procession of textured, larger-than- life monoprints rendered on handmade paper. Ever inspired by the natural word, Oka Doner developed these works by collecting bark, sticks, and roots and arranging them into figure-like forms, the resulting compositions neither drawn nor etched, but transposed from the source materials themselves. As Allison Cross notes, “from these [forest] remains have emerged her gods and goddesses—bark becomes skin, expressively alive.” Soft and ethereal, Oka Doner herself likens these figures to gods and goddesses. Central to the exhibition is an installation, consisting of a granary, which viewers are encouraged to enter, filled with more than fifty of the artist’s “Soul Catchers”—small, head-like objects rendered in ceramic and bronze. The installation on view is, in part, an extension of a monumental example realized in 2010 for the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which contained more than four- hundred Soul Catchers. Of the Soul Catchers, Oka Doner says:
“The world itself has a soul, found in the human capacity of imagination. It manifests itself in dreams and fantasy, poetry and art. Soul Catchers have been created from raw materials since primitive times to catch the souls of the sick and hasten their return to health. Soul Catchers keep the souls of the departed in the community or imprison the souls of wrongdoers until they repent. A Soul Catcher placed in the house has been thought by many cultures to prevent souls from leaving prematurely. Once this was the provenance of the Shaman.”
