December 12, 2009 

Hillyer is the gallery run by International Arts & Artists, a non-profit that sponsors international exhibitions, runs a design studio and several programs geared toward international art exchanges. The surprisingly spacious building is tucked in the alley behind the Phillips Gallery and the Cosmos Club in the location previously used by the Foundry Gallery. This month it hosts the work of Martha Jackson-Jarvis and Tom Wolff.

Jackson-Jarvis’s “Ass on the Wall” is a tour-de-force room-sized installation that envelopes the viewer with a scale that makes one feel like Gulliver amidst the Brobdingnagians  (those are the giants – I checked).  Two walls are covered with floor-to-ceiling silk pieces printed with the image of a huge donkey and the other two form the backdrop to and source of tangled branches/roots that end in excrescences of plant-like bulbs of ceramic, glass, stone and God knows what all.

She explains it thusly:
In a chance encounter in the mountains of Tajikistan Jarvis discovered an incredible being in a moment of clarity that bridges the void between animate and inanimate form. A moment when plants, animals, and minerals are one, even the rocks conspire to a fluid and connected greatness.
 

Wolff's Teller