Ditta Baron Hoeber’s Inscapes

Inscape: (noun) an inward quality belonging uniquely to objects or events in human experience, as perceived by the poet, embodied in patterns of poetic elements such as imagery, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, sound symbolism, and allusion. (Merriam-Webster)

The title of this exhibition, Inscapes, layers upon this definition a portmanteau of “interior” and “landscape,” the artist’s psyche as a scene.

Most of the works in Inscapes are pictures of Ditta Baron Hoeber’s home, arranged in what she terms “photographic sequences,” framed or presented in hand-made accordion books. The same window or shelf may appear a dozen times, yet seem wholly different from image to image. The daily new-ness of Hoeber’s surroundings is marked by spectral, changing light — midday brazen, or inky at nighttime. The meaning of an image shifts with its place in the sequence, contingent on what comes before or after.

There is a photograph with a fiery burst of amaryllis in the foreground. Their brightness transforms the room into a shadowy place. A lone figure is seated at a desk or looking out of a window. A sequence of clasped hands, photographed with the slightest shifts of angle and distance, become geometric, scuttling, shivery forms after Hoeber paints their surroundings black. Items of daily use, like a jug of milk or a banana peel, become imbued with comic and monumental gravitas. The picture of a crumpled, used napkin is printed larger than life. Billowy, shroud-like white folds hold a grace I thought only possible in the fictional realm of Dutch paintings. Then I am reminded that I am looking at a napkin, about to be discarded.

Hoeber’s training as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1960 to 1964 and at Skowhegan in 1961 is present throughout these works. Color and form are malleable to her, and she holds no fealty to the photograph as an index of truth. She edits the pictures digitally, or by cutting, pasting, and painting with gouache. There is a Monet-like quality in her dedication to depicting light and her nearly obsessive revisiting of the same subjects. Her studio is in her home, and her home is the landscape of her life. Windows and walls are her haystacks.

Shape and space are always meticulously arranged. Hoeber has a penchant for white grids and sparseness. Despite momentary resemblance, 20th century formalism or minimalism is not the root of her work. Rather, the “poetic elements” of inscape’s definition strike closer to the heart of her practice. Hoeber’s dual identities as a poet and as a visual artist are not disparate. With color, line, and imagery, Hoeber constructs passages of visually depicted rhythm, rhyme, and assonance. Her photographic sequences are like sentences, and the spaces depicted in these photographs are, like language, at once denotative and connotative, allusive and literal.

Home is an extension of Hoeber’s artwork. It is an aesthetic and sculptural project that literally and figuratively contains her practice, while also being its subject and stage. The earliest example of this relationship can be found in Art Stories, a series of photographs documenting a no-longer extant assemblage on the walls and shelves of her laundry room in the 1980s.  She arranged photographs and ephemera into a tapestry of image, narrative, and formal delight. According to Hoeber, she had stopped thinking of herself as an artist at the time. Yet this is only true if artists are defined by their production of objects for the eyes of others. Hoeber’s slow, private, decade-long accretion represented a turning point in her artwork. It was a fusion of architecture and collage, sculpture and image, collection with display, and domestic-work with art-work. Then, through photographic documentation, laundry room assemblage transformed into still life.

In 2006, Hoeber collaborated with an architect to turn one floor of an old South Philadelphia factory building into a live-work space. Its final state exhibits the same aesthetic principles of her many artist books. Swathes of empty white wall frame careful arrangements of furniture and objects. There are countless little compositions; is a stack of dishes any less of an assemblage because it is meant to be used?

Delineations between ‘art’ and ‘not art’ are erased through equal application of Hoeber’s desire to arrange. Square, gridded bookshelves house hundreds of volumes, but also serve as grounds for composition. There is an eerie doll’s eye that opens and closes, and lives atop a bottle of ink. A facsimile of a Rembrandt etching sits between sheets of plastic, and beside it is a tiny and yellowing hand drawn map, location and purpose unknown. A black and white patterned moth sits inside a porcelain box. Drawers open, and odds and ends are positioned like an abstract painting.

The logics of these arrangements belong solely to the artist. Hoeber herself is not pictured in Inscapes. Yet this project reveals her photographs, home, and her practice as a whole, to be a personification of self.

Olivia Jia,  Artist and Curator