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.
Back to previous page.
