'What's Lost, What's Found'

Ordinarily I don't like pigeonholing artists by gender, however, in considering the art of Suzanne Simpson and Jacqui Biggs Larsen, in "What's Lost, What's Found" at Art Access, I've made an exception. Their vision is so acutely shaped by their sympathetic response to life's experiences, their concerns are ultimately . . . womanly.

The director of Art Access, Ruth Lubbers, said both artists are driven by similar concepts: exploring loss and discovery — Simpson through digital montage, Biggs Larsen through mixed-media painting. Their getting together was a stroke of luck for them and fortune for us.

Gallery visitors will be overwhelmed with Biggs Larsen's contribution to the show: 365 individual works on paper, 7 1/2 inches square, as well as two paintings and a 3-D assemblage.

The paintings and assemblage could be a story in and of themselves, but the pi�ce de resistance is Biggs Larsen's 365 mixed-media paintings, one for each day of the year. "I always wanted to see what daily art would look like," she said.

The project began on her 42nd birthday, Sept. 17, 2004, and ended on Sept. 16, 2005. During this time Biggs Larsen traveled with her husband and four children (ages 15, 12, 9 and 6) to England, Scotland, France and Italy and back home to Springville.

"Each month I hunted for local materials," she said. "Blue prints and decorative paper in Springville, sheet music, stamps and engravings in London, hand-marbleized paper and discarded letters in Florence."

Her children often helped in collecting the objects.

Initially she thought the process would be very simple — each day Biggs Larsen would make a collage and paint on it. She did this for awhile, but then realized she was always thinking backward and forward.

"We're always thinking ahead to the future and remembering things in the past," she said. "So I started working ahead a little bit and also adding things to the past. I would add more images or more paint, or change the color of things I'd already done."

Another aspect of the show that will engage visitors is the daily, descriptive notes Biggs Larsen made during the trip.

Some are enigmatic:

Sept. 20, 2004 — Look left. Look right. How can we understand anything or anyone? or Sept. 30, 2004 — Last day for Erika to have "two of them in there."

Others are quite clear: