Patricia Wheeler: The Art of Protest: Sept. 2-Dec.19, 2008 Hall Gallery
concurrent with
“Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth.”
Pat wheeler has committed her artistic and personal life to expressing issues of peace and international human rights. Her multi-media work takes the form of paintings, quilts with fabric and collaged paper, re-assembled mixed media pieces, and collaborative work. Reaching beyond a conventional definition of quilting, some of her work uses stitchery to convey traditional women’s needle arts but with content that is passionately activist. Her causes are varied and she finds them in the life, song, dance, and art of the M’Buti, the Kalahari Bushmen, the Australian aboriginal people, and the native peoples of our own land. Wheeler comments “it is for us, the artists and dancers, to push the edges of society and to create the balance needed for our survival. but I also feel that first we must mourn the ‘lost worlds,’ issue our apologies and make amends.”
A resident of Deer Isle, Pat Wheeler has been in an arts residency program at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon. This intensive program provides participants with opportunities to expand the relationships between art, nature, and humanity through workshops, presentations and individual research projects. Her work has been exhibited around the country and internationally, from “Visions in Textiles 2005" in Izmir, Turkey, to “Human Rights Institute: Security Blanket,” a solo exhibition at Georgetown Law School, Washington, D.C. As founder and coordinator of the Maine Artist’s Peace Project, Wheeler’s activist voice is heard on many tv and radio interviews.
Empty Dress
Empty Dress is a memorial to Rachel Corrie, of Olympia, Washington, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer on Mar. 16, 2003, as she stood before it trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in the southern Gaza Strip. She was 23 years old and working for the International Solidarity Movement.
When I heard the news of this young woman’s brutal death I wept. I have a daughter. How could I not feel complete empathy for her loss? The dress (slip) used in Empty Dress was sent to me by my own daughter, Meg Wolfe, a cast off from her collection of costumes for her work as a modern dancer and choreographer. I felt that it perfectly represented the life of a young girl, barely out of her teens, poised and ready for life--a life brutally cut short by an unspeakable act of violence. But then violence is ever present at the borders of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
The small faces inserted in the tea bag papers that run down the center of the dress are some of the children she tried to defend and who also have died in this conflict. In the silk envelope sewn close to the hem of the garment is the fragile remains of a butterfly, symbol of transformation, broken, dead. Handwritten text excerpted from Rachel’s own words appear behind the butterfly.
A quote from Howard Zinn sums up the tradition of her work. “Rachel Corrie's heroism is part of a long tradition in the history of this country, of people who crossed into other parts of the world, without the endorsement or protection of the United States government, to express the common bond with victims of injustice in other countries. I’m thinking of those Americans who went to Spain to join the struggle against Franco’s Fascism, of Leo Linder who lost his life in Nicaragua trying to help the Sandinista revolutionaries rebuild their war torn country, of the nuns who went to El Salvador to help the poor in that country and were murdered by death squads, of the people in Voices in the Wilderness who challenged official policy and brought food and medicine to the people of Iraq. Our hope for a future world community rests with such people, like Rachel Corrie, whose lives and deaths always remind us that all people in all countries deserve the same justice.”
(Note: Rachel Corrie’s death has never been investigated by the United States government.)
Empty Dress 