Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 24, 1991 TAG: 9102210248
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANN WEINSTEIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Built up in plaster and concrete on flat plywood cutouts that conform to the shape of the subject, the pieces defy the properties of both techniques - or extend the properties beyond their usual definitions.
Those are not the only expectations the works confound, fluctuating as they do between myth and mirror, communal knowledge and daily living.
At first glance, these pieces appear to define women by domestic activities: woman as broom, comb, spoon, fork, scissors. But they also entail shifts in scale and meaning, skewed allusions to myths, lore and fairytales, and storytelling at its most enigmatic.
Most of these pieces are installed with black-and-white woodcuts that are laminated to the cutouts, facing front. The images on the back sides erupt into visceral color and fuller, more fleshy dimensions. But their weight and substance - seen only in the flat, illusionary space of mirrored reflections - are greatly qualified. Despite the heightened color, the ironic humor is often psychologically and spiritually dark.
In this context, the robed Buddha in "Monument," replete with worshippers, looks more like a female than a male deity. She is serene, ancient, unseeing. On the reverse side she may be the Hindu force known as Kali. She is a slender woman of color, clad only in a book and eyeglasses, reading, with huge monstrous feet and a rocket fitting snugly between her legs. She fits the definition of Hinduism as everything and its opposite or, reduced to today's terms, as total woman. Like all this work, it is too fraught with ideas and issues to be purely sensual.
A woman's body turns into an out-sized comb in "Comb Poem" and, in a reference to art history, a woman's Renaissance face tops a fork. In "Rapunzel Revisited," a tiny man climbs up a woman's broom/braid. True to the myth, in "Medusa Saw/Perseus Shield," the snaky-haired Gorgon is seen only in reflection. "Mirror, mirror on the wall . . . ".
In "Oops, I Think I Killed It," large, knuckled, three-dimensional hands hold and dangle a baby by its mid-section, as if about to squeeze. On the reverse side - also in living (and killing) color - hands hold a grown but infantile man in the same position in chilling role reversal.
The show runs through March 8. The Grandin Theatre Gallery, 1310 Grandin Road, is open during theater hours.
Pat West lives her art and paints her life.
Everything - from cozy corners to expansive views - is a delicious melange in a state of flux, always changing, shifting, becoming.
It's hard to separate art from artifacts in her domestic interiors. Or woods from their reflections, in a domestic landscape. Or for that matter, in several of the paintings at Mill Mountain Coffee and Tea, interiors from exteriors.
West is a representational artist or, if you prefer, a realist. But her sense of reality encompasses pattern as well as object; movement as well as season; personality as well as place; and nature as all of the above.
Even the vitality of her technique reflects the push/pull of personality. She draws through the daubs and strokes of fat paint with the narrow end of the brush handle, while the negative space of the sky alternates aggressively with a mosaic of leaves.
Many of the images might dissolve into chaos except for the natural order and stabilizing grace of intuitively centered, or nearly so, compositions.
The show runs through March 7. Mill Mountain Coffee and Tea, 112 Campbell Avenue, S.E., is open Sunday from noon to 8 p.m. and Monday through Saturday from 7 a.m. to midnight.
by CNB