Press & Commentary

“Geer’s complex work deals with communal memory, nurturing, self-sacrifice and loss of voice and language. Her concerns include the tensions between breath and emptiness, impermanence and time…”

Naida Osline, catalog, INAUDIBLE WHISPERS, 1999

“Geer’s vision is one that highlights the transitory nature of the common substances we eat. And through her installations and her concerns with “art practice” and the memories of vision and tastes she makes a number of telling cultural, social and political commentaries.”

M.A.Greenstein, World Sculpture News, Summer 1999

 “Geer’s art does not remain static, either for her or for the spectator. The unfolding of time and physical space is particularly relevant. Sound and movement make her installations every bit a physical phenomenon. A sense of play mingles precariously with a sense of foreboding and uncertainty. Viewers step into the slightly disorienting space, and as they do, they become integral to the work.” 

Elanore Wells, Visions, Spring 1988

“The effect is to draw the viewer to float in the shady, seductive area of the creative subconscious. The experience of the work’s particulars, which amount to a series of dualities that are posited and then reconciled, is thus conveyed as a highly personal and meditative experience.”

Betty Ann Brown, ArtScene, July/Aug 1990

“Entering an installation by Suvan Geer is like reading the opening lines of a very good poem: you trust the author immediately and are willing to follow them wherever they lead.”

Michael Laurence, Visions, Spring 1993 

“The milk and the emphasis on pattern (the doily), the repetition (the continuous flow) and the effects of passing time (the impermanent dusting of powdered milk) suggest the dual aspects of “nature: and “culture” that are said to influence a child’s development… The piece, of course, does not answer this question. Rather it raises it anew in a fresh and immediate visual format, which is a much more exciting proposition.”

Cathy Curtis, LA Times, Oct 10, 1995

“Utilizing elements as simple and again – as seemingly neutral as egg shells and powdered milk, she asks us to look at the ways in which motherhood, female fertility and child-rearing so often have been made to seem unnatural and turned into tools used to control women’s bodies and destinies.”

Devorah Knaff, Artweek, May 1996

Geer has assembled a body of work that is thought-provoking, exquisitely crafted and hauntingly beautiful.” 

Daniella Walsh, OC Register, Oct 22, 1999

“…used the bracketing moments of birth and death as a framework from which to alight on the interconnected nature of communal, human experience. In the work, With Mother’ Milk: Milk Table, an elegant, formal table sits within a chalk circle of poetic whispers including: “to tie her down…hush…pieces too small to choke on.” Enveloping both the furniture and the viewers’ recourse to critical distancing, there is no escape from their circulating insistence.”

Jacqueline Cooper, Artweek, Sept 1999

“Her installations involve the viewer in teasing out the deeper meaning of small gestures. In the storefront sited “Tales From the Dinner Table” Geer addresses emotional social issues without ever raising her voice. Images of motherhood, nurturing and mistreatment mingle and build slowly in this piece, which consists of brief, first-person texts and a few spare images: cracked, fire-blackened eggshells; the silhouette of a tied-up animal outlined in powdered milk.”

Cathy Curtis, LA Times Jan 2, 1996

“Her boat-nest/compass is a metaphor for memory in motion – slow turning, with torn bits of the artist’s journals and a few antique photographs lodged among the pine needles. The installation offers viewers art as a vessel to re-vision human memory as a liquid, timeless realm of searching, populated by fragments of birth, death and repetition – the essential elements of human recollection.”

Joanna Roche, catalog, WHAT WE SAW OF IT, 2017

“How we respond to this flood of sensual stimulation depends on who we are and what experiences we’ve had. “Life is ephemeral, time is ephemeral” the work seems to say.”

Shirle Gottlieb, ArtScene, May 1999

“Geer has created a room for listening, a place where spoken and unspoken desires are linked with the dynamics of language and the silent longing for utopia.”

Betty Ann Brown, catalog, UTOPIAN DIALOGUES, 1993