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GALLERIES
'Dense' crucible combines clay, paint, sculpture

By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent, 3/19/2004

There's something almost holy in the grouping of artists in "Dense," an exhibition at the Genovese/Sullivan Gallery. Vermont potter Malcolm Wright provided the impetus for the show with a body of work different than anything he'd done before. He fired his clay at a wood kiln in Elkton, Ore., where the ashes of West Coast trees infused it with different tones; he left it in the kiln for 100 hours, rather than his usual 24. David Sullivan and Camellia Genovese then sought out other artists on their roster, making work that varied from the rest of their oeuvre. They tapped painter Mary Boochever and sculptors Jay Swift and Matt Harle.

It isn't so much how these artists veer from their own work as how they come together that impresses. Each demonstrates such a devotion to material and purity of form that most of the work is utterly simple, yet transcendent. Harle is the exception; like the others, he swears by material and process. But he has an aesthetic that intends to prod and prickle. The other three stick to color and form, and so to beauty. Harle's wormy rubber wall hangings go against this grain.

Even so, step into the gallery and you'll wish you had brought a cushion to sit on and meditate, the space is so soothing and peaceful. Swift, who ordinarily makes free-standing stone sculptures, here contributes flat wall sculptures that are fashioned from slate and granite. Fanciful, rounded biomorphic shapes cast vivid shadows on the wall; despite their density, they're gestural and as light as bubbles.

Boochever, always fascinated with the juxtapositions of colors, here devotes herself to the subtleties of a single tone: gold. She frames "Lux Interna" with gold-leaf-covered wood. The canvas inside replicates the tones of the frame in paint. The gold frame glitters, casting light out; the canvas, much flatter and subtly imbued with green and red, is like a still pool pulling you in. Peaked at the top, it's a 21st-century altarpiece, a site for endless contemplation.

Wright's vessels stand in the middle of the gallery. Unglazed, they illustrate the mystery of the firing process, as dripping ash paints over the surface of the clay. The bowls are an uncanny conflation of red earth and swirling galaxies; a single, elegant line drawn in the clay spirals to the bottom.

The ceramist's firing process is a good metaphor for the crucible of creation all artists go through, offering up their materials and skill to the fate of an intense process. In the case of these three, that process distills earth-born materials into works of limpid clarity.

A new take on adventure tourism Youngsuk Suh is a people-watcher and a landscape photographer. His large-format color photos at Clifford-Smith Gallery capture the majesty of national parkland on Maui: the intoxicating verdure, the almost Martian volcanic landscapes. Suh shoots many images over a period of hours, then culls through them digitally, tweaking tones and adding or removing figures from the scene as if he is playing with toy soldiers.

In most of the images, the tiny people appear oddly heightened and disconnected, both from the landscape and from one another. They don't look at one another. They aim their cameras in strange directions. Clad in shorts and sneakers, wearing fanny packs, they tread along a footpath in a lava-burned desert. Or they scramble around the lush, rocky cove surrounding a waterfall, like ants at a picnic.

Suh comments on adventure tourism and on how these T-shirt-clad adventurers are both exposed to and protected from the rawness of nature. A national park, in essence, is a wilderness theme park. His lush prints, soaking into velvety paper, pay tribute to natural beauty and question how it has been packaged. There's something hapless and endearing about the tiny people wandering through these vast landscapes. There's also something irksome about them: They get in the way of the viewer's utopian vision of national parks.

That's the artist's intention: His viewer's longing for the wilderness is no different than that of his subjects. But Suh doesn't criticize our human need for vaulting beauty in these photos. Juxtaposing the tiny people and the giant Hawaiian landscape, he suggests that the pursuit of beauty is both humble and noble in itself.

Where clinical meets spiritual Audrey Goldstein's ambitious installations at Kingston Gallery wittily conflate digital, physiological, and language systems. They come together in spaces that are part Frankenstein's lab, part health spa, part spiritual retreat.

"Acupuncture Table" is set up within sheer white curtains, suggesting the hush of a practitioner's room, but also something heavenly. Needles trace the form of a body in a tabletop of wire mesh. Cables snake across the floor in a pattern from the table legs to a plastic tower, as if the patient's chi, or energy, is being siphoned off. Taut knotted strings at the top of the tower refer to an ancient Incan wand, perhaps used as a language system. Circuitry below fronts a wall prickling with stiff hairs, like those that process sound in the inner ear.

This complicated pattern of transmitters and receivers replicates the absent figure on the table; they also suggest that these systems, one layered on the next, are more connected than we know.

With "Acupuncture Table" and her other installation, "Cupping Chair," which takes off from a healing practice that uses warm cups to draw toxins from the body, Goldstein ties the figure into these vast energy channels.

There's serenity to this work, but also something fearsome in the Frankensteinian undertones of hooking humans into other systems such as computer circuitry. Goldstein's work embodies that fine tension between the allure of individuality and that of being part of something greater.

This story ran on page D22 of the Boston Globe on 3/19/2004.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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