Every time I stumble into Denise Treizman’s work—and I do literally mean stumble: it was at an Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Open Studios Night back in 2017 when I almost walked into a pile of glitter on the floor of her then-studio and first fell heels-over-head in love with her creations—I am floored (I’m so sorry) with the particular joy that some absurdism-enthusiasts experience when presented with hilarious, kawaii, unexpected, nonessential, and in my case: sparkly, things.
So it is with the Chilean-Israeli artist’s current show. Her first solo museum exhibition, “Glean, Glow, Glam!”, at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, confronts visitors with more piles: coral-athletic-tape strewn, neon-light-lit, broken-umbrella-glorifying whirlwinds of pseudo-found-objects laid carefully into…are they arrangements? Sculptures? People asked the same about Pistoletto.
The show’s central piece has three big, bent, yellow taxi car bumpers piled in the middle. César-esque paradise. Strips of errant, but not tangled, neon. Not tangled, no: the layout of this pile is no more random than the shades and splotches of an abstract painting. Colorful ropes. Shimmering-in-the-light bubble wraps in various pastel hues, almost iridescent like an oil slick, cushion a Treizman signature favorite: a pool noodle. Copper wires are placed on glitter paper of all colors. Teal bubble wrap, gold tinsel. Squished, dented plastic balls, like the kind from a McDonald’s ball jump, are “shish-kebabed?” in a rainbow row. Reflective green paper and spray-painted helmets throughout. A shower mat, patterned with yellow duckies, which belonged to Treizman’s daughter.
To glean (or so says the dictionary): to gather grain or other produce left by reapers; to gather information or material bit by bit; to pick over in search of relevant material. Such is Treizman’s process of accumulating materials: gathering bit by bit. Compiling things that would otherwise be thrown away, calling them art, recognizing their art, such that instead of a curated little mound of rubbish, we have a careful assemblage of preservation. But then there’s also the non-trash, which someday will be trash, the hoarding of shiny ribbon and fluffy yarn from Alibaba, the endless colorful craft materials, the plastic and neon lights. Part Ready Made, part Nevelson but in full color, part completely of-its-time commentary on the product and waste excess of the 21st Century.
Treizman used to mostly find objects for her wild sculptures of stuff. Now she purchases many of the materials—mostly to compose her weavings—about which she explains: “This is how my work has mutated into a conversation, where I participate in consumerism by actually buying more of these things, instead of just finding them. But that simply enhances the conversation that I want to have, one people can relate to, which is this never-ending cycle of consumerism that we love and hate at the same time.”
”A lot of it is about desirable materials that should not really exist,” Treizman muses, confirming that her splurging (yet salvaged) work comments on the excess of consumption—as her curator Mahara Martinez explains it, Treizman “questions the need for single-use materials while celebrating the irresistible attraction she feels towards them.”
“We all hate to buy this cheap item; one can think of the consequences, where it came from, and how long it’s gonna last. But we can’t help it. If we like the item, we’re gonna buy it. Like the LED strip lights…I mean, what could be more desirable than a neon light sign? You can just buy a strip and make whatever you want out of it!”
That’s the glam and glow part: fluorescents, neons, chemically dyed, synthetic yarns, pretty plastics—all of it shiny, fluffy, and fabulous. It’s a phenomenon that such beautiful ribbons and packaging materials get quickly and easily made and then thrown away. In Treizman’s work, they are memorialized. The Coral Springs exhibit, writes Martinez, “becomes a reflection on mass-produced society, a space where criticism and fascination coexist, leading the audience to explore the endless possibilities offered by [Treizman’s] art.” One such possibility being pseudo-environmentalist guilt. Big Yellow Taxi lyrics come to mind. But Treizman makes unpleasant awareness so much fun.
Past the initial pile, brilliant neons glorified on the all-white wall: a Treizman tapestry. For years, the artist has worked with looms to create enormous weavings of her gleanings. “Like a gift shop” (below) is an immersion of twinkle lights in plastic tubing, fuzzy polyester pink yarn, blue yarn, black yarn, yellow yarn, hot fuschia feathery yarn, silver lurex yarn, and silver scrubbing sponges. Pink duct tape, red bubble wrap, black foam string, neon orange string, shiny blue streamers, blue tinsel, more string in peach, teal, and neon yellow. A bright pink and yellow Nike sneaker perches in the middle; on the ground in front of this stitching, like gifts to an altar, lie iridescent silver and pink hula hoops, more rainbow twinkle lights, a turquoise spray-painted foam board, seafoam duct tape, silver reflective paper which captures a tie dye amalgam of reflections, spools of cobalt lurex thread placed carefully albeit seemingly randomly, a(nother) turquoise pool noodle. And golden glitter, of course.
One goes a little crazy with the abundance of it all. This is the point. In front of a tapestry, we are asked to immerse in each material, miniscule yet marvelous. Easily otherwise underappreciated. (We don’t ask enough, HOW did this gorgeous synthetic happen? And, can they ever un-happen? These bright orange strings and neon purples are certifiably inorganic.)
“Glean, Glow, Glam!” the show specifically emphasizes Treizman’s working concept of “non hierarchy.” It’s a “visual game” where each element, be it an intentional and delicate ceramic, to a broken beach chair, to a silver foam board, to a pile of neon strip lights, claims an equal narrative in Treizman’s work. What could look like a freak accident of spilled, rainbow-hued garbage has been carefully splayed on the floor to emulate the sort of careless way that we do, in fact, often treat these materials both when we use them and when we are done with them. Again, Treizman reminds us that colorful tape and painted vinyl scraps are Art. In one floor assemblage, an older hand-woven tapestry is rolled and placed on the floor “like a found old rug.” A broken hotdog cart umbrella she found on the streets of New York is joined by a ceramic piece “in its own little room, so it feels more sacred,” in an attempt to elevate the quality of what Treizman found and also downgrade the quality of what Treizman made so that both are treated in the same way, she explains.
She’s toying (literally: through occasional use of toys in the artworks) with her concept of “value osmosis.” There’s the irony of a slow, handloomed weaving — a centuries-old art — with the fast and machine-made things we throw away without second thought. Meanwhile, the single-use is given permanence.
Many of the items she has held onto for years; each piece had its own story even without the validation of a museum. Treizman kept a storage unit in New York to hoard items like the taxi bumpers, and the broken Sabrett umbrella. Oh, and the painted PVC pipes that span the room, randomly yet elegantly, if PVC pipes can ever be elegant. They were originally conceived as objects meant to be interacted with when they lived as a public artwork in Randall’s Island, NYC, 2016. Visitors used to sit on them. Now, they’re untouchable museum Art.
On one wall are displayed Treizman’s 2-D works, which feature her color moodboards and the organic shapes that must inspire her 3-D installations, diagramed with rainbow pom poms, tinfoil, purple duct tape, etc. Treizman is multimedia in both material and form — she dabbles in sculpture, textiles, organically-shaped, free-form ceramics (made inorganic by bright colored paints and glazes, her clay forms as random as the more “useful” items Treizman uses to make “useless” art), paintings, drawings, and collage.
It’s continual discovery, such as one would experience at the store, online, or at the landfill. Don’t forget to look up, too; there’s a pool noodle and a deflated, glitter-filled pool donut coming out of a missing ceiling tile. And watch out for more molehills of errant, step-in-able glitter.
Denise Treizman’s exhibition Glean, Glow, Glam! runs at Coral Springs Museum of Art through March 31st, 2024. 2855 Coral Springs Drive, Coral Springs, FL 33065.
About the writer: Anne Whiting is an award-winning writer, fashion designer, and artist whose work explores the contradictions in the making of vibrant art and design with the waste that such making generates. Her favorite artists investigate the oppositions of the generous and colorful to the toxic and drab of consumer culture. She has worked with the NYC Dept. of Sanitation on waste-awareness and waste-reduction initiatives such as ReFashion Week NYC, and manages a platform run by college and high school students about sustainable fashion called An Inconvenient Wardrobe. She sits on the Junior Board of Free Arts NYC. She holds degrees in this subject matter from Parsons School of Design and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.