On
the day I saw the summer group show “Heat” at D. Berman Gallery,
it had been about 100 degrees outside for over a week. I’d just
seen “An Inconvenient Truth,” and I’d been driving around burning
fossil fuels to do my necessary errands while listening to assorted
environmental horrors on NPR. So I was in an anxious/irritable/we’re-all-doomed
kind of mood when I stepped into the calm and cool of the gallery.
This show delights the eye and collectively envisions a more benign
and creative collaboration between man and nature, so it was the
perfect antidote to my apocalyptic state of mind, however briefly.
The six artists in the show all feature the landscape, landscape
elements, or natural forms in their works, and they combine these
with the man-made, the imaginary, and the playfully artificial to
create works that are pleasurable to look at and enticingly open-ended
in content.
In his two loose
assemblages, Steve Wiman groups natural and manmade objects to create
an implied picture plane. Each small three-dimensional object is
hung directly on the gallery wall; when viewed from a few yards
away the careful collections become flat abstractions. One of these
collections is composed of dirt-colored objects, the other is dominated
by oranges, greens and pinks.
Faith Gay contributes
two sculptures and one wall piece to the show. The sculptures look
like stacked and balanced rock formations, except the rocks appear
to be wrapped in Gustav Klimt-style giftwrap. The wrap did not come
from the Party Pig but was crafted by the artist from colored duct
tape, fluorescent adhesive dots and clear plastic. These enormous
toy-like sculptures invoke human’s embellishment of nature. Gay’s
wall piece, which is also arranged to create an implied picture
plane on the wall, uses many individual plastic beads (melted plastic
beads, according to the gallery’s website- I wonder how smelly that
process is?) to form biomorphic shapes with candy-colored concentric
rings. The shapes evoke cells, geodes, galaxies and any number of
other natural phenomena. The material used made me think of toys
again- Shrinky Dinks, Lite-Brites, that gum from the 70s that looked
like tiny multicolored pebbles—and kept the piece from being too
ponderous.
I’m normally
not very interested in digital art—I like to see an artist’s physical
touch in her work, and I’m bored by a lack of surface variation—but
I was somewhat seduced by Sarah Greene Reed’s five digital collage
prints, in which flora, fauna and manmade ephemera are under- and
overlaid with lively wallpaper-like patterns. These compositions
offered pure visual pleasure; but I couldn’t help thinking that
they’d be even more satisfying if they had been painted.
Robert Dale Anderson
and Christopher Schade each contribute two small and mysterious
landscape paintings. Anderson’s paintings employ foggy, broken color
and a kind of extreme, nearsighted atmospheric perspective to represent
an otherworldly landscape—a little like Monet painting on the planet
Venus. Schade’s tiny abstracted landscapes are intriguing and dreamlike.
In her watercolor
paintings, which have the unrehearsed, thinking-on-paper feel of
drawings despite their geometric precision, Cynthia Camlin seems
to be breaking organic forms down into purely mathematical, planar
or maybe molecular structures. Sandra Fiedorek’s white marble sculpture
seems to be another natural/artificial hybrid—is it a mutant cowboy
hat? An unknown sea creature? It doesn’t really matter—it’s formally
beautiful in its ambiguity, and I wouldn’t have looked at it for
long if it had been identifiable. This is my favorite kind of show—there
are no one-note pieces, dogmatic statements, or baffling conceptual
riddles—just visual art that really is visual, and invites extended
looking without entirely giving up its mystery.
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