"Stretch"
At the Oakland Museum of California
By Mary Lee McNeal, Nov. 2003

Marta Thoma's recent exhibition of large sculpture made of aluminum mesh, molded steel and cast latex gives the viewer an opportunity to consider the stretch between childhood and adulthood, and to note Thoma's fresh and humorous approach to the stretch between masculine and feminine energies.

The mesh pieces--huge, nearly transparent girl's dresses-are both bold and eerily fragile. Standing near them, you find yourself shrinking. Their scale is ironic, their details (buttons, fluted collars, puffy sleeves) are decidedly feminine, but at bottom of each piece is a pair of gigantic shoes--hard, rough, old, and scuffed. Under each piece, stick-straight legs jut from the shoes to the knees, then become curved spiral upper-legs. There is something both funny and fantastic about these shapes, as if we're invited to stare at an image of childhood so huge that we feel small and uncertain next to it, thrust back into childhood, where things look overpoweringly large.

An added pleasure of the largest piece, called Stretch'n in Dad's Shoes !, are video images projected onto it at night. The mesh is a fluid reflector of color and shape, and shimmers with expanding and shrinking images: tweety bird, a stuffed rabbit, the face of a girl who might be beauty, might be beast. Interspersed between these images are abstract patterns and bright colors. The effect is mesmerizing, the way a powerful myth draws listeners of all ages.

The pieces are subtle, and suggest femininity without use of head, face, or hair. One dress, eighteen feet long, is lying down, inviting the viewer to peek under the skirt at its internal structure, the bones of these body-less girls. This piece, titled Stretch'n in Dad's Shoes 2, has one arm stretching overhead as if a great child were lying on the floor in repose, tired of playing in Dad's huge shoes. Another, Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes, manages somehow to convey the great joy and pride known clearly by any female who has ever worn a pair of red shoes.

Thoma's other pieces in this exhibit, two equally large cast cement balls, offer an opportunity to view her style of presenting delicate feminine images such as moths, babies, and dancers in combination with disparate depictions of industry and progress, such as mathematical fractals and tires. Each gigantic ball has a skirt of the delicate mesh, inviting us to laugh or to wonder, to stretch our notions of the space between fantasy and fear, childhood and adulthood, masculine and feminine.

MaryLee McNeal
863 Melville Ave.
Palo Alto, CA 94301
650-326-8011
marylee@mcneals.net