Thursday, June 28, 2001; Page C01
Galleries
No Longer Cast in Bronze
Sculptors Melt Art's Traditional Boundaries
By Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
The art world's in the middle of another identity crisis, it seems, prompting some intense bouts of self examination. Several exhibits circulating this spring and University of Maryland's "Painting Zero Degree" come to mind -- further broadened our already liberal definition of picturemaking. Like a twister sweeping Oklahoma in May, these shows sucked up most anything in their path (Post-It notes, wall-to-wall carpet, photographs) and pronounced it all "painting." Now sculpture, too, squirms under curators' microscopes. According to "Futur Skulpture," one such examination of the medium now on view at McLean Project for the Arts, sculpture, like its no longer-easel-bound cousin, can be most anything you please.
"Sculpture has almost dematerialized now," saysAndrea Pollan, the McLean gallery's exhibitions director. No wonder, then, that the 108 submissions,from artists living in the mid-Atlantic region, incorporated a virtual bouillabaisse of media, including video, colored water, salt, and a Web site. Of these, juror Glenn Harper, editor of Sculpture magazine, chose 14 pieces that, if nothing else, confirm that bronze, marble and wood are totally last century. "These artists are looking at a more diverse group of materials and pushing everyday materials to their limits," Harper says. "They aren't thinking of making something for the ages but in engaging in a dialogue with what's happening now."
In this clean and punchy show, Harper's observation translates into work that cleverly manipulates workaday stuff. Paulo Machado fashioned a jointed, spinelike floor piece out of paper grocery bags. Randy Jewart piled up 5,000 nickels into a gorgeous woven metal tower. And Kristin Caskey blew up a fleur-de-lis wallpaper pattern into a 20-foot-long orange velveteen monster that creeps off the wall like an alien born of bourgeois comfort. Like great novelists, the best artists in this show make the everyday strange. There is, however, a downside to this anything-goes edict -- it doesn't always work. Zoe Leoudaki's entry, the www.fear.gr Web site, asks participants to catalogue their fears online in passages that read like a teenager's diary. Hers is the most generous definition of sculpture here, and the least convincing. Likewise, Walter Ratzat had a good thing going with his installation of four devices – at once bondage gear and audio equipment -- modeled on as many copper stick figures. But the audiovisual portion that runs alongside his sculptures – an interactive video adventure featuring a young man droning on about an unhappy New Year's Eve and his early homoerotic memories - is a flaccid affair that saps his gizmos of their mystery.
Ultimately, straightforward appeals to the senses trump so many clicks of the mouse. Mary Early's spiky floor sculpture looks something like a sea urchin coated in fragrant beeswax; its divine scent attracts our attention again and again, like the best of Wolfgang Laib. Equally compelling is recent Corcoran grad Fumihito Sato's "Basic Vision," a gravity-defying installation of wood blocks suspended from a 10-foot armature; the blocks hang precariously by some sticky-looking glop that turns out to be pantyhose-sheer stretch fabric, like the kind Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto uses. Sato's work, though less refined than his art star cousin's, is no less bewildering for the uneasy equilibrium it offers.
Futur Skulpture at McLean Project for the Arts, 1234 Ingleside Ave., McLean. Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday 1-5 p.m., 703-790-0123, to July 21.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company