1967 | FILTER

Baltimore, MD

Filter, 1967

12″ x 5″

A tall wire mesh screen, a translucent barrier outdoors, allowing the viewer to appreciate several spatial dichotomies simultaneously: the nebulous mesh wall can be looked at and through, tracing a broken line even as it remains a flat vertical plane. The sculpture folded back on itself creates a single form that is both inside and outside, this side and that side, an impenetrable translucency and yet a perforated solid. While still an independent object, formed of a single layer folded back on itself, it nevertheless functioned in a spatially complicated manner, both blocking and diverting motion, impeding the body while channeling its path. Certain paradoxes of this structure have been described by Ronald Onorato, who notes that it it ‘both inside and outside, this side and that side, an impenetrable translucency and yet perforated solid.’ however, the screen is best assessed for the manner in a single or double – layered structure, and for the way in which it at once frames, filters and complicates the vistas over the surrounding terrain.” In 1985, Miss said about the work that she enjoyed layering connotation into her pieces rather than creating monolithic forms, “I started making things like that big screen filter; it is fairly large, but it has no body to it. I like making things that were transparent, that you could see through, that were less separate from their physical context.”