Monday, June 28, 1999
Smallest sculptures steal a big Carnegie show
BY OWEN FINDSEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Sometimes the smallest art makes the biggest impression. That's the story at the Carnegie's summer sculpture exhibition, where Terri Kern's miniature ceramic landscapes, shown in the smallest gallery, steal the show.
This is some show to steal. The six exhibiting sculptors all have a strong personal vision and the talent and skill to fascinate viewers.
Anthony Becker uses chicken wire and rice paper to fill a room with flying but tattered angels. Teresa Young turns bits of rusty steel plate into graceful fabric-like forms.
William Potter stretches the idea of painting so far that it becomes sculpture. Daniel Tackett turns tree branches into whimsical machines. Gary Marcinowski gives simple square and rectangular boxes a sense of mystery.
But Terri Kern's art has staying power. She turns clay into little hills and fields, softly colored in green and gray. Each includes a chair, a house or a bird, the three constant symbols in her work.
Etched into the clay are trees, grass, picket fences, at the same time precise and vague, like a distant memory you can't quite reach. Some become faces, and some faces become birdhouses. They seem to be scenes from spooky fairy tales.
Ms. Kern is a ceramic artist with a studio in the Pendleton Art Center. She lives in a house in Price Hill that her family has lived in for four generations. The house is central to the memories her art evokes. She sees each work as a “visual marker” based on “the seconds, moments and hours that I share with my grandma.”
Ms. Kern's grandmother has Alzheimer's disease.
“I am haunted by those few times when I glimpsed in her eyes the recognition and fear that things were not what they should be,” the artist says.
As her grandmother's memory fades, the artist says she tries “to imagine a place where she thinks she is.” Those places are in her art, and through her art, she takes us there. The resonance of these places stays with you long after you leave the room.
Soaring in the air in the main gallery are flying angels, a bit tattered and worn. Anthony Becker, also a Pendleton artist, forms the figures from chicken wire, covered in ragged bits of rice paper.
The artist says his intention is to make the figures light and free, but the finished figures become ragged and stiff.
“They seem to be falling earthward,” Mr. Becker says. “All my preconceived ideas about beauty and perfection are gone.”
One dark angel, made of metal, rides through the space on a curious vehicle that seems to be a weapon. Perhaps it is he who is making the angels fall.
Teresa Young, a South Carolina artist, makes quilts in steel. Her large, twisting forms hold the ground below the angels.
Her art is a study in contrasts. The material is hard, brutal and masculine. But the objects seem soft, as if they are made of cloth. They seem to be woven or stitched. “I think of it as sewing or quilting in steel,” she says.
Dark, rectangular boxes that seem to hum with some inner power are the work of Gary Marcinowski, a sculptor and furniture designer who is a sculpture professor at the University of Dayton.
It is easy to overlook these simple boxes, ignoring their beautifully finished surfaces and overlooking their subtle variations. The most fascinating is a long, narrow black box, solid except for a groove in the top. The inner surface of the groove is covered with gold leaf, and seems to glow. It gives the box the aura of an ancient shrine.
William Potter, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, does not call himself a sculptor. His works are conceived as paintings in space, built of wood, painted and textured as if he were pulling a geometric abstraction off the canvas. “I often think of a painting as being in a state of shifting or unfolding itself,” he says.
The works, which hang on and project from the wall, suggest the constructivist artists of the early 20th century, Hans Arp in particular. Like those early artists, Mr. Potter is interested in visual response to pure form.
Daniel Tackett, a graduate student at Miami University, comes from Texas and brings the look of a spare Texas landscape into his work. He uses large, thin tree branches that dictate the overall form of each piece, and adds stones and other objects to create objects that function as fanciful gadgets.
Handles, hinges, propellors and lids are incorporated into the artwork, which also seem to have personalities, like rustic robots.
“The act of reclaiming and reconstructing the discarded wood is an attempt,” Mr. Tackett says, “to point out the need for a sensitive balance; to reveal in tangible form, the necessity for a harmonious relationship with nature.”
Sculpture Month, The Carnegie through July 31. 491-2030.
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