ELLYN WEISS


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Sculpture Now 2010 at Edison Place

January 9, 2010

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Faith Flanagan and Brigitte Reyes conferring
I'm back in town and seeing my first new art of 2010. The Washington Sculptor’s Group holds an annual juried show that, as the name suggests, showcases the selected current work of members. As in past years, this year’s version is housed in Pepco’s open and expansive Edison Place Gallery at 8th and G Sts. NW.
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attention to Holtsman's "Twelve Squares"
The juror, Ryan Hill, has, he says, chosen work that “draws on our longing for a passing ideal of wholeness, our ways of making fragments cohesive…” I like the idea and the elasticity of the construct; we do constantly strive at both the conscious and unconscious levels to make visual and experiential sense of fragmentary information and as a contemporary organizing principle in the time of whizzing bits of data, it is very apt.
The show, however, seems a bit sparse on the ground, with the often small pieces set adrift in the large galleries and, with the exception of John Simpkins-Camp’s hanging monopoly-money dirigible, no use is made of the fabulous space created by very high ceilings.
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Leila Holtsman
I love Leila Holtsman’s “Twelve Squares”, a wall-mounted “painting” of acrylic ink on weathered steel. Her use of hard yet vulnerable materials creates an elegant surface where the painted grid seems about to slide off in dissolution.
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Elena Patino has contributed a collapsing cube of translucent white gridded plastic tubing connected with thread and monofilament. She calls it “Cuadricula (Long Live Sol Lewitt)”. It is a vulnerable and lovely object that makes good use of the shadows cast by the deteriorating cube.
The piece with the most stage presence is no doubt Karen Bondarchuk’s five-foot dead crow made of scavenged roadside tire scraps. There is nothing more dead than scraps of old tire; the perfectly inert blackness sucks up light and the piece makes an effective if ambiguous statement about the human effect on nature, given that the crow is a pretty nasty scavenger of death.
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Kerry O. Furlani's piece
Just to prove that I don’t respond exclusively to decaying stuff, I’ll also call out Kerry O. Furlani’s two wall-mounted slate pieces and Alice Yutzy's stoneware plinth "Emergence". They both won me with the impeccable nature of their craftsmanship and the evocative quality both artists achieved by the smooth feminine curves in juxtaposition with architectural shapes. Are they battlements? Sexual or military?


Finally, I must do a mini-rant here; I am discouraged by some work that is badly made, sloppily constructed and unlikely to last intact much beyond the month-long duration of the show. One sees that too much in contexts where it can’t truly be said to be driven by conceptual dictates. It usually feels like a childish insult to me.
 
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© 2012 ELLYN WEISS