Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 24, 1991 TAG: 9103220169
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-22 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANN WEINSTEIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Harris's new installation fills the space in the Painter Gallery at Virginia Western Community College. It is made with many techniques, many materials (except clay) and a limited, conceptual palette with a dark range of colors.
As different as the two pieces are, they are both about female vulnerability and invincibility: courage in the face of futility and verve in the face of disaster. In many guises, this is the continuous and biographical theme in Harris' work.
One enters the gallery as if it were a theater. Individual vertical scrolls of paper or cheesecloth hang from the ceiling at regular intervals, with shadowy figures visible through their transparency. A painting of a generic theater, replete with a blank screen, hangs on the far wall. Close by, three folding chairs, spray painted matte black and draped with remnants of cheesecloth, suggest the trinity, family and loss.
When the viewer turns around to face the "audience," the drawings of draped women, with mask-faces and thick muscular legs indicated under the drapery, are seen to be cut, photocopied and pieced together in disjointed repetitions. They shrink and dissolve as they recede, much as figures in a darkened theater would. An apocalyptic scene of shrouded mountains or crashing waves hangs on the end wall behind them.
On one side wall of the gallery, long paper scrolls trail gray or black rubbings, perhaps of murky paths taken or not. On the other side, framed, probably found photographs, are not quite discernible even in the rational light of day. Empty rectangles, like pictures without images, show through on a horizontal scroll of paper sprayed unevenly black. Also an embroidery quotes T.S. Elliot: "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." "Reality" trails off in thread and depth of color.
The disjuncture of the figures and the multiple components of the work contribute as much meaning as any of its individual parts. That is to say, the work's structure is a literal visualization of its total concept: life uncertain, obscure, in flux. And in pain.
There is plenty of symbolism that is literal. But in the end, no matter how many ideas feed Harris' work, it's really about feelings - ambiguous, amorphous and as binding as steel - that refuse to be pushed or tugged into linear, logical metaphors.
On the other hand, for a show with so dark an aura, it is close to neutral emotionally. This is in part because there is so much play and pleasure, care and concentration in its making and because, no matter how personal or intimate the work, it depicts the human state and not an individual person.
While the theatrics heighten the installation, they also remove it emotionally. We are as much participants as we are observers.
The show runs through March 31. The Painter Gallery, Virginia Western Community Gallery, is open Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m.; Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 6 to 9:30 p.m.; and Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Pluralism, a post-modern phenomenon, reintroduced content and many simultaneous styles into art.
"Pluralism," the exhibit at the Olin Hall Gallery at Roanoke College, brings news of prints and drawings not usually available in this area. Borrowed from the California State University Art Museum at Long Beach, it is a mini-record of the 1970s and '80s. Generally, the show falls into two segments, figurative and expressive or minimal and conceptual.
April Gornick's charcoal and pastel drawing, in which a centered island of a linga emerges from a still sea under swelling spread-eagled clouds, gives visual tension to the symbolic substance of Hinduism's creative principle.
In "Berlin Wall," Jonathan Borofsky tames fascist-dog viciousness with the orderly convention of pattern and decoration, consisting here of victim birds.
The colorful pastel "Woman in Robe No. 3" by George Segal is more individualized (and less distant and platonic) than the white plaster figures that he casts directly from human figures. The incomplete gestural figure in an untitled charcoal drawing by Susan Rothenberg has a haunting quality, while Eric Fischl invests female nudes, in barely defined domestic scenes, with psychological tension. An untitled charcoal by Elizabeth Murray reduces the figure to basic forms.
Two clothed figures are not quite inundated by a wave in the not-quite specific narrative of Richard Bosman's acrylic drawing. Titled "Five Falls," Bryan Hunt's portfolio of six intensely black and white prints deals with the shape of watery movement. Pat Steir's portfolio of six prints deals with variations of the line - which, next to impulse, mud-pie and concept, is the most basic element of art.
In an acrylic and alogram drawing by Art & Language, (a group formed in 1968), a faint, stabilizing grid overlays the irregularities of the most basic information: printed words hanging on a museum wall.
Black and white, primary colors and rectangles in Louisa Chase's ink and watercolor recall Mondrian. Her gesture, splash and free-hand drawing contradict him. Calculations of confining lines obviate any spiritual or even gestural implications in Charles Arnoldi's fevered color sendup of abstract expressionism.
The show runs through April 7. The Olin Hall Gallery, Roanoke College, is open Tuesday through Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m.
by CNB