"I Love Manhattan": Visual Tributes to the Greatest City, Gallery & Studio, Jan. 2003
9/11 Paint By Numbers, Jersey Journal - September 7, 2002
November-December 2003/January 2004
At Viridian: A Sharp Focus on Selected Gallery Artists
By Lawrence Downes
Heard's realist painting "Burnie Pitzel, Patriot, Scans for Weapons of Mass Destruction" depicts a mature gentleman in a desolate landscape with Stonehenge like rock mutations and a scattering of tiny tourists in the distance. He is wearing earphones and a vigilant expression as he scans the ground with an instrument that looks like a combination of a Geiger counter and old-fashioned vacuum cleaner as an ominously overcast chemical sky looms overhead.
Equally zany is a life-size wire sculpture by Heard called "Yee Hah." With the ease of a lasso tossed in the air, Heard's piece conjures up a gun-totin' Annie Oakley type cowgal struttin' her stuff on a star-shaped Plexiglas base. Given our current political climate she seems the rootin' tootin spirit of the great state of Tex-Ass.
Nearby, Susan Sills' freestanding oil on wood cutout sculptures cast their own wry spell. A "Bruegel Bagpiper" plays and "Bruegel Children" dance. Sharing the same t100r is that dancing couple-you know, the woman in the red bonnet and the guy in the yellow straw hat-from another famous painting by Renoir. As with all of Sills' delightful post- Pop takes of familiar figures from art At Viridian: A Sharp Focus on Select Gallery Artists history, encountering them out of context, blown up to more or less life-size, is like spotting one's favorite movie stars on the street. They look just as good in person!
Several of the artists in this show mine the fertile area between the abstract and representational:
Kathleen King's acrylic paintings can only be called metaphysical abstractions, with their intricate maze-like compositions, suggesting strange landscapes or interiors yet leaving us as to exactly what it is that we're looking at. Like the eccentric California artist William T. Wiley, King seems to dance to her own inner drummer; yet the formal boldness of her compositions and her way of layering daubs of confectionery color like bright confetti makes her paintings visually sumptuous as well as deliciously weird.
The objects that Sabine Carlson paints may be highway markers or something equally mundane, but they take on the quality of strange, impassive sentries in her mistily atmospheric oils on canvas. As a consequence one looks at these squat, t1uorescently striped things as though one were a visitor from outer space inspecting the accouterments of earthlings for the first time and trying to decipher their meaning. Especially mysterious is Carlson's large triptych, in which the striped gizmos interact with clanky crane like structures in what appears to be some toxic industrial wasteland. Jordan Zweit1er revels fruitfully in the eclecticism and ambiguity of postmodern aesthetics, life, and politics. His oils on canvas combine fragmented figures, gestural vigor, textual semiotics, and flat areas of bright color in a manner simultaneously akin to artists as diverse as R.B. Kitaj, Jean Michel Basquiat, and early pre-silkscreen Warhol-the last particularly in the canvas Zweit1er calls "Good to the Last Drop." In Zweifler's "Woman Thermometer Variants," shapely female figures sprout from a thermometer like tree branches in a manner at once cerebral and surreal, as in certain paintings by Picabia, albeit with Zweifler's own peculiar painterly panache.
Bob Tomlinson employs classical anatomy as a vehicle for gestural abstraction. Employing t10wing oil washes on canvas, Tomlinson sets nude male and female figures at10at in compositions that evoke baroque atmospheres, even while focusing forcefully on form and rhythm as formal autonomous entities. At the same time, the narrative subtext that Tomlinson's stridently mannered figures suggest makes his work all the more compelling.
Amid all these postmodernists, Janet L. Bohman is the odd artist out, in that she has stubbornly adhered to a stringent modernist aesthetic since the mid 1970s. Bohman's commitment pays off handsomely in her dynamic shaped wall reliefs created with linen or paper stretched over shaped armatures. For decades, Bohman has sought to evoke the spirit of flight and she does so splendidly in pieces such as "Phoenixing" and "Flying V," in which streamlined shapes, their surfaces enhanced by vibrant stripes of color, convey an exhilarating velocity.
