1990 – 2003 – Janet Geib Pretti

1990 – 2003

I was ready to move beyond my graduate work and create work that captured the complexity of life, the ups and downs, the joys and sorrows. I was ready for my figures to have arms, to be proactive and engaged, moving forward with their lives, but all I had was a box of armless castings. I resorted to carving their arms out of wood. The puppet-like arms could be altered to express the mood and purpose of the piece. The wood contrasted with the formality of the bronze. I also wanted my figures to not merely stand on bases, but to exist within a moment in time. The bases began to evolve to set the stage and context for the figures. One day, I impulsively started painting the figures and bases to unify them and bring them to life. I felt like I was violating sculpture cardinal rules. One by one I discovered a purpose for the figures in my reject box. .

Couple Painted bronze and wood, last revision 1990, 27" x 11" x 17". Couple began the year of our marriage, 1978. The figures were locked rigidly in step, the woman one step behind; their individual bases were bound together in a wedge-shaped box narrowing into the future. Several years passed; the figures were freed from the confines of the box, but spikes and obstacles sprouted in their path. In frustration, it was disassembled and abandoned. In 1990, I tried again. The bases were smoothed and color brought life to the figures. Twenty-nine years have passed. The heart-shaped faces and interchanged shadows remain, vestiges of the ideals with which we began our marriage; the worn and scarred bases remain, a record of the growing pains of our marriage; and Lonnie and I still stride resolutely into the future.

Painted bronze and wood, last revision, 1990, each 14" x 14" x 48". Roles define our lives, pulling us in conflicting directions. My father and husband feel caught between the tasks, joys and responsibilities of family and work. My mother and I are pulled and tugged by the needs, memory, and inspiration of the people of our lives.

Painted bronze and wood, 1991, 22" x 4" x 17". Everything - ourselves, our ideas, our world - is part of a continuum. We never stand alone, always there are those who came before and those who will come after.

Waiting to Begin Painted bronze and wood, 1991, 16" x 10" x 17". As a child, I always had a thinking place, a rock high on a hill, from which the valley and my childhood traumas and achievements looked small and inconsequential. It was a place to reflect, a place to plan, a place to celebrate, a place to heal. When I grew up and left the mountains, sculpture became my thinking place.

In Between Bronze, wood, raffia and thread. last revision 1990, 16" x 10" x 17". I tinkered with this piece through several showings before boxing up all my bronzes and turning my attention to drawing. After my son started kindergarten, I pulled the boxes off the shelf. It was an amazing period of clarity. I made my peace with the way I made sculpture and, one by one, began to rediscover, reclaim each figure, each sculpture. The years of storage in an unheated shed had taken its toll on In Between. The raffia was in tatters, and in the places where it had broken or slumped, patina stripes could be seen, cris-crossing the figure, echoing the original taunt bindings. I kept putting off a planned re-wrap and then I understood. Change is inevitable. Families, jobs and living arrangements continually evolve. Sometimes I readily shuck the confines of the old, eager to explore the new. But some transitions are hard, forced, painful. Going back is not an option; going forward seems impossible. I am trapped in a backwater, an in between, by my pride, my fear of starting over, my refusal to trade in old hopes and dreams. In Between went into storage tightly bound; it came out marked by the experience, but its bindings were falling away, disintegrating. In Between isn’t a moment in time, it is a process. It takes time to grieve losses, to accept and welcome new possibilities. It takes time for wounds to scab over, heal and scar. But eventually I am ready - to sail on, to chart a new course, to learn a new way of being.

Painted bronze and wood, 1992, 10" x 10" x 43". My father returned to his beloved Rockies in the winter of 1992. It was a clear, crisp winter day. His family and closest friends went with him, skiing and snowmobiling, high into the mountains into an aspen grove on land he had once owned, land that he loved, land that he sold to pay for his daughters’ college educations. I live by the ocean, where the tide ebbs and flows, and the rumble of the surf and the rustle of the wind swell from a whisper to a roar during the winter storms, anchoring my life. When the tears still come at unexpected moments, I imagine the aspen grove in the fall, as it was when we rounded-up cattle from their summer range, and I know that we are both home.

Painted bronze, steel and wood, 1991,12" x 30" x 18". Whether relationships erode from neglect, vanish over time and distance, or implode in crisis, my memories are peopled with what was, what could have been, and what never will be. Memories of severed relationships shift and change with the emotional weather of the day, causing my "memory vanes" to pivot, sometimes facing each other, sometimes moving apart, sometimes showing traces of shape and reality, other times flat and raw.

Painted bronze and wood, and plastic, last revision 1991, 18" x 18" x 21". Messenger was a piece that demanded to be made, but once it was, it unsettled me. I avoided it. Of all my pieces, this bronze figure was the only one that I could not crawl inside of. For years I wondered if I was one of the shadows. My mother claims I was not born shy, but became shy because I was born with a cataract in one eye. It was diagnosed and removed when I was four, a second surgery followed six months later. At five, doctors began trying to force the eye to see by patching my good eye, starting with three hours a day, gradually stretching it to three weeks with patching, three weeks without. Like the glasses perched on my nose, permanently askew from the pairing of a coke bottle lens and a plano lens, my life teetered out of balance between the life of a normal active child and that of a dependent, legally-blind child. In second grade efforts to salvage the eye ended, but repeated, prolonged colds led to a tonsillectomy. In third grade, I was back in glasses for my near-sighted good eye; a bad fall necessitated another round of doctors and tests to rule out epilepsy; and I had a final eye surgery. From sixth to ninth grade, alarmed by my accelerating near-sightedness, my doctor prescribed daily eye drops to dilate the pupil and a bifocal lens. Once more the mirror reflected mismatched eyes and glasses. Slowly but surely, with each surgery, doctor visit and eye drop, I retreated, becoming increasingly shy and unsure. But in eighth grade, I impulsively ran for student body president. I wrote my speech with the help of my English teacher, in secrecy, in case I chickened out. The speech was carefully crafted with humor and a clear message - that while it had never happened in the history of Glenwood Springs Junior High, girls were just as capable as boys to serve as student body president. It was 1965, I had no chance of winning, but I was ecstatic. I felt triumphant - my words had connected, triggering nods of agreement, claps, and laughter in all the right places. As I left the stage, a boy shouldered his way through the crowd; his mouth twisted in rage, spewing expletives; his fist raised to strike, before someone stepped between us, shoving him back into the crowd. Inexplicable bits of memory of the words and euphoria lingered; memories of running for a school office and the boy vanished forever into a black hole in my brain. After my high school 20th class reunion, close friends gathered. We found ourselves talking about our greatest fears, wondering why. One friend spoke of her fear of flying, another of her fear of heights. I spoke of my predictable fear of doctors in white coats and hospital smells, but also of panic attacks that seemed to be triggered by words. I tried to describe the sudden, deep fear that would descend hitting a shut-off valve - clamping my throat shut, freezing my thoughts, in the middle of casual conversations, meetings, and family celebrations. Most episodes passed quickly, but some reverberated through my life for days, weeks. I spoke of my growing distrust of words and how I chose my words carefully, avoiding words of substance or reducing them into crisp, blunt statements that could be voiced quickly, before the silence took hold. I confessed to "forgetting" events and other ruses, to avoid or mask times words refused to flow. My best friend laughed, declaring, "finally one we can solve." She went on to recounted that lost day from eighth grade, surprised I could not remember giving the speech or its impact. Initially I dismissed her theory that an adolescent "angry white male's" reaction to a forgotten speech was the source of the terrors. But later, after children and community causes propelled me back into the world escalating the frequency and severity of the episodes, I began to analyze them and read about the brain. It is my amygdala, my survival brain, which watches over me, sending out red alert warnings of impending doom when attention turns to me and I open my mouth to speak. If my words are of facts and figures, my rising fear can quickly be doused, but if I speak from the heart, about beliefs and passions, the fear swells, threatening to swallow every word. Other events, as I came of age in a patriarchal world, fueled and intensified my amygdala's diligence, but I learned to work behind the scenes or in solitude, to speak through sculpture or give my ideas to others. I muzzle my opinions or voice them, depending on whether they are worth fighting through the fear. I still struggle with Messenger. She shouts her message with a confidence and boldness that is so very foreign to me. It is clear that her words do not dam up in her throat to wither and die unspoken. I finally understand that Messenger is not me as I am, but me as I am not. She is a bitter sweet reflection of who I might have been; who I was for one brief exhilarating moment between shyness and fear; and she is who I still long to be.

Going it Alone Painted bronze and wood, last revision 2003. 23"x16"x29". Going it Alone began as Moving toward Consensus. In 1984, voters rejected our local schools annual tax levy. Out of money, the schools closed, making the national news. Parents and community members were galvanized, and the levy was passed on a second try. For the next six years, until a tax base finally passed by ten votes, an ever-changing group mobilized in the spring to attempt to pass an updated school tax base. When it failed, we regrouped in the fall to pass the then necessary annual school tax levy. We never agreed on why or how to convince voters to tax themselves for the common good, but we struggled on with a shared belief that closing schools was not an option. In 2003, schools closed early all around Oregon. Services of every sort were slashed. Voters twice defeated measures to temporarily raise taxes to reinstate some of the harshest cuts, and the discussion returned to what to cut next, making decisions based on the viability of re-election campaigns. Moving toward Consensus no longer seemed possible. I chopped the sculpture apart, isolating each person with their own biases and agendas. Individual taxpayers, political parties, unions, programs, niche groups are going it alone, while the choice to begin moving toward consensus lies dormant, waiting for the will and the determination to begin the struggle of working together for a greater good.

Puzzle Boy Painted bronze and wood, last revision 1990, 27"x9"x16" Originally this figure was part of a family in a piece called Procession. I had purposely created figures that were unique, but in the end had to accept that their differences were too distracting for the piece as a whole. First, I eliminated the father, later the mother. The piece perplexed me. I called it Puzzle Boy. As early as 1979, I suspected it might be Raymond, my husband's son. He lived with his mother on the East Coast. His father had not seen him in five years. He was unknown, a missing piece in the puzzle of our family. In 1984, Ray came to live with us as a teenager full of the unfinished business of his parents' long ago divorce, and my suspicion was confirmed. Years later, after both sons were raised, I realize it could just as easily have been about his brother, Darin, about sons and their mothers.