Klezmer is Mesmerizing 2012

Klezmer is Mesmerizing  2012
By Kathleen Sloan

Deborah Klezmer’s art, similar to Tiffany’s Art Nouveau pieces, is made of glass and metal carefully blended with proportions and interfaces that create dreamy pools, serpentine byways and vistas, which from farther off become of-a-piece biomorphic sculptures with an other-worldly glow.

Through technical processes, her prose and drawings are displayed within glass sleeves, as are photographic images, some of women that focus on the period from the 1880s-through-1920s.  She has scavenged and scoured for photographic plates and antique hardware. She discovered a cache of Tiffany glass and “jewels,” which she uses sparingly in these pieces.

Klezmer described her technical researches and trials and errors that went into making these amalgam pieces into wholes that are greater than their parts.

A sculptor for the last 13 years, Klezmer, trained from youth-to-young adult as a playwright and was an editor, researcher and writer on a project that produced a 17-volume history of women throughout the ages.  

Klezmer’s sculptures, besides giving us aesthetic pleasure, are intense one-act plays that give us setting, place, character and plot.  

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Playwright sculptor Klezmer knows conflict moves the plot, reveals the character and engages the audience. A strong protagonist with a strong point of view gets the audience inside, projecting, feeling, wanting and struggling through the character.

Klezmer’s main character, in many of the sculptures on display, is a gay woman from this era—a time, she says, when love between women went from being accepted and commonly referred to as a “Boston marriage” to being unacceptable and vilified.

She chooses a “very intimate” voice, she says, in an effort to reach the viewer, moving them beyond bias and misperceptions to realize that “love is love.”

Klezmer chooses the overall shape of the sculpture as a container for the story within. For example, one work is shaped like a Victorian Era padlock, only 20 times as large, with a dark patina, sending us to another age—and a matrilineal one, when feminine curves dominated the most utilitarian objects, insisting that beauty and decorum infuse our humdrum lives.

This shield-like shape has many “key holes,” its negative space just as curvy, giving interplay of lightness and weight, secrecy and revelation between metal and glass. 

Stage center is a Victorian woman’s head, high neckline and upper bosom in black lace, circumscribed by a cameo-like circle. The metal surround has a gun-bluing patina, swirling like captured smoke. Splayed parentheses-shaped cutouts below hold red-veined orchids, aglow and funereal, embalmed in glass. Above we see encased prose on parchment surrounded by labyrinthine drawings that mesmerize and pull us deeper into a trance. 

Finally we read the words. An offstage character with a parallel storyline, we realize after the second reading and reconsideration of the whole sculpture. The mortuary flavor of the imagery becomes picante with understanding. A murder has taken place and this character is gauging the effect the trial will have on her own lesbian relationship. Klezmer, during the artist talk, says this sculpture was inspired by a real trial that was pivotal in changing attitudes from blasé to sinister.

Long after viewing the sculpture it still reverberates and blooms in meaning and sensation. I am lost in admiration for Klezmer’s depth and subtlety. It evokes a suspension of belief so powerful one can smell the murdered woman’s perfume and feel the solitude of the narrator looking out the window, down the path that will bring unchanged connection or new ostracism.

Klezmer said her goal was to incite empathy and understanding and she certainly achieves it. 
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