When most of us think of sculpture, we think of weighty, earth-bound artworks. Artists Beverly Penn and Hillevi Baar break this stereotype with crisp structures composed as much of light and shadow as of mass.
Beverly Penn's wall-based artworks, while superficially quite attractive, have layers of conceptual content that lead to a deeper beauty. The artist has directly cast numerous botanical artifacts in bronze and joined these to more obviously artificial metal forms. The plants call to mind a display one might see in a museum of natural history. The formal display of these organisms from our everyday environment creates a mental separation between the viewer and the object observed. This human/nature interface is one of the core themes that the artist explores. In several works, highly abstracted plant forms that are made to be a part of architecture are juxtaposed with the very realistic casts. The fascinating Family Tree incorporates several bar codes, which are from various articles the artist has used to create her work. The plants in this piece appear to be connected in an organizational chart, but the taxonomy thereby created is completely artificial - these plants are not related to one another in any other way than their form. The piece likely refers to the genetic maniplation of plants.
Penn's Magnetic North is a great example of her fine technical Skill as a metalworker. She has delicately etched a disk with words indicating plants and directions and joined this to several plant forms to create a compass of sorts. The disk is so subtly crafted that one might take it as an antique found object - there is no distracting clunkiness or roughness to be seen.
Hillevi Baar's delicate works pair well with Penn's. These lightweight pieces, crafted out of mylar and herculene, softly command the spaces and light around them. Slender, near-invisible metal supports provide structure. Patterns are painstakingly drawn on the sheets of film, only to be dissected and rearranged by the artist. Dutch Swirl, Red Pattern, and Arabesque are fairly flat, with the pattern of the drawing predominating. In these the pattern is cut into tiny squares and reassembled at varying depths echoing the tonality of the pattern. In other works, the sculptural aspect is more important, although they remain wall-based. Weeping Willow extends well into the room and responds to the movement of the air that surrounds it. Baar's Orange Pop (which likely riffs on Larry Poons' op art pieces from the Sixties) fully commands the wall where it is installed and quite deliberately incorporates shadow into its near-luminous design. –Jacqueline May