THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 4, 1996 TAG: 9608060518
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 107 lines
IN THE 1960s, Minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd and Carl Andre made cold, anonymous forms that looked like industrial products.
Then came the Land Artists, who made the earth their medium and brought attention to the growing concern over our vulnerable natural resources. Since then, a growing number of artists have been making work that expresses ecological fears and honors nature.
The Minimal and nature camps might seem to be separate worlds, even mutually exclusive. However, in a show of drawings and sculptures by Baltimore sculptor John Ruppert at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts, the work suggests a reconciliation.
The show features his work from the last five years, from large cast metal forms to huge chain-link fence vessels. A dialogue is suggested between the organic and the industrial, a conversation that is surprising in its fluidity.
It is as though the artist discovered an interconnectedness that naturally existed and is merely documenting his findings. In fact, Ruppert has achieved this by merging his knowledge of metal foundry techniques with his interest in Minimalist sculpture, fine crafts and nature-honoring art and added to the mix his own instincts.
For Ruppert, the ``violent processes that shape the earth'' are an important influence on his art, gallery labels state. Metal casting, though it occurs in a cold, industrial space and involves heavy machinery, is reminiscent of nothing less than the creation of the world. Molten metal, handled at 2,000 to 3,000 degrees, is akin to lava from a volcanic eruption, the artist explains in a video set up in the gallery. He adds that the resultant forms remind him of ancient rock fossils in their permanent retention of phenomena in the mold.
Since childhood, Ruppert has been fascinated with geology. As a youngster, he lived for a time in the Middle East and was struck by its ancient ruins
He earned his MFA in 1977 from the School for American Craftsmen at the Rochester (N.Y.) Institute of Technology, then worked for two years as an artist-in-residence at a commercial foundry in St. Louis, Mo. Since 1987, he has lived in Maryland, where he teaches sculpture at the University of Maryland, College Park.
At the arts center, Ruppert's impact begins outside the entrance, where four aluminum pumpkins cast from an actual 650-pound gourd are set out as if to ripen further in the sun. Just inside the center, in the skylit atrium, is his fifth pumpkin - an opened gourd, a portion of its form lifted off and laid nearby. Thus, gallerygoers can spy inside and see how it was constructed, by welding together at least 14 sections.
The five gourds constitute his 1996 ``Pumpkin Series.'' It is significant that he chose such a big gourd, because gravity appears to be acting on the form, causing it to slump and become misshapen.
As it turns out, each of Ruppert's pieces deals with the effect of a natural phenomenon - from gravity to lightning. In each case, Ruppert works with a related principle in his casting or construction technique.
Inside the main gallery, aluminum castings of tree limbs sheared by lightning and collected by the artist are displayed on low pedestals. The wood itself recorded the violent effects of an electrical charge. Likewise, in casting the wood, Ruppert alluded to the residue of such natural occurrences by retaining the ``residue'' of the casting process.
As a result, the lightning forms have unpolished surfaces with sections that are gritty, pocked and blackened. It's a rich patina.
For those pieces, he also retained the ``flashing,'' another ``natural'' event in casting. Flashing is the physical evidence of where molten metal tried to escape the mold, usually along a form's edge.
Most sculptors trim flashing from their forms. Here, Ruppert has used flashing to an expressive end. In ``Split Strike,'' a vertical form cast from a limb split halfway by lightning, the flashing along the split creates in its negative space an uncanny resemblance to a lightning bolt.
Three large drawings installed nearby are spare, elegant images of the primary gesture of lightning, or lightning-struck wood: It's not clear which it is. Such ambiguity points to the similarity between the act, and the behavior and resultant appearance of that which is acted upon.
Notably, these drawings were made in 1991, four years before Ruppert made the sculptures. So these are not, as might be presumed, drawings of existent forms.
In the case of a 1991 sculpture, ``Crater,'' and a 1991 drawing with the same title, the relationship between drawing and sculpture is quite different. After making the sculpture - a 75-inch-diameter concave form with a decrepit, rusty surface - Ruppert made a rubbing of the piece on a huge sheet of paper, much as a tourist might make a rubbing of an old tombstone.
The rubbing underlines the sculpture's relic qualities: ``Crater'' looks like a mysterious artifact from another civilization. The piece also suggests the sort of items that could be found in the stashes of decaying discards that so attracted him at the St. Louis foundry.
And then there are the fence vessels. In his brief abandonment of metal casting, Ruppert engineered these three giant forms - ranging in height from 8 to 10 feet - out of prison-grade chain-link fencing. The engineering is as simple as that found on a woven basket, only on a huge scale.
``Vortex'' (1994) consists of a cylinder of fencing pulled together at the base by metal rings of graduating diameters. As with the opened pumpkin, visitors can look inside the form and see how it was made. As with the lightning pieces, the fencing alludes to its origins as material intended for an enclosure. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
``Chamber'' is one of John Ruppert's works on display.
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ON EXHIBIT
What: ``John Ruppert: Natural Forces/Urban Context,'' sculpture
by a Baltimore artist
Where: Virginia Beach Center for the Arts, 2200 Parks Ave.
When: through Sept. 8
Hours: 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 10 a.m. to 4
p.m. Saturday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.
How much: free
Call: 425-0000 by CNB