Alison Saar: STILL

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still:
silence; tranquility; a distilling apparatus; appease; dispel; banish; cause to subside; immobile;
subdued; obsolete; dead at birth; continuing now or in the future as in the past; yet; nonetheless; in spite
of everything; static; stagnant…
STIL DEFINED
essay by Barbara Thompson, Ph.D.
In the English language, “still” is a wonderfully complex and poetic word that covers a wide
range of ideas, actions, and descriptions. In her new solo exhibition, STILL…, Alison Saar
beautifully captures and plays with the subtle elasticity of meanings and uses of “still.” Saar’s
witty titles and visual punning reveal her continued fascination with lexis and metaphor, while
concealing darker issues of oppression, poverty, and human devaluation that lie just under the
surface of American society.
Previous:
50 Proof, 2012 (detail)
Glass, copper, rubber
steel, soap, cotton
textiles, enamel basin
and water
63 x 27 x 20 inches
Left:
Still Run Dry, 2012 (detail)
Glass, copper, rubber,
lead and steel
75 x 116 x 14 inches
Rendered in Saar’s signature style, the new work features crudely constructed armatures,
apparatus, and mechanics made from copper, lead, steel, rusty chains, and rope that interact
with a cast of life-size characters. Roughly soldered copper pipes connect to clear rubber
tubing running through, into, and out of figurative glass vessels. These hollow and transparent
vessels contain red, black, and murky liquids, which the viewer can activate by squeezing
simple black pumps. Saar’s mechanics and her use of copper pipes and coiled tubing quickly
bring to mind a by-gone era of the Temperance Movement, Prohibition, and Great Depression
when alcohol manufacture, distribution, and sales were banned, leading to the illegal brewing
of hard liquors in backyard stills. i
In 2011, Saar was invited as an artist-in-residence at Pilchuk Glass School, thus opening up
new ways of thinking about her practice and allowing her to combine more familiar materials,
such as wood, bronze, and found objects with glass, a medium she has never worked with
before. “I went there thinking ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do’ but I was really interested
in glassware from labs… and experimenting…. From there it went into this weird stage
between laboratory, science experiments, and stills.”ii Saar became particularly interested in
the aesthetics of hand-made, backyard stills, “the moonshine ones, funky burn marks, and
soldering.” The “stills” that began at Pilchuck as ideas, now fully rigged, are metaphors of the
commoditized human body—valuable if functional, obsolete if not.
As the title implies, Still Run Dry no longer produces precious, vital, or intoxicating liquids.
It has no mechanics; its hollow parts—a heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, breasts, uterus, and
ovaries—do not function. The clear glass organs, placed on shelves are “like specimens… lab-like.”
These body parts seem to have once contained liquids but are now dried up, dirty, and
caked with dust. “Super derelict,” as Saar notes.
The armature of the dysfunctional still complements the empty organs and includes blown
and burnt out copper piping and torn rubber tubing that resembles “an experiment gone awry
or neglected.” More directly, though, Still Run Dry deals with sexism and ageism in which