print Summer 1991

Linnea Glatt and Frances Merritt Thompson

Architectural sculptor Linnea Glatt and photocollagist Frances Merritt Thompson’s collaboration, Expose, Acknowledge, Reconcile, 1989, consists of two drywall structures that run the length of the gallery, inset with a series of slatted, wooden screens that can be opened by the viewer to reveal backlit transparencies. Two rows of elegant, if not quite comfortable, double-sided plywood chairs run down the center of the installation.

Filling the entire windows, Thompson’s Duratrans photocollages achieve a cinematic presence. They combine such images as a human fetus with a medieval map of the solar

print November 1990

Bruno Andrade

Bruno Andrade recently abandoned his abstract painted-wood wall reliefs in favor of lush,colorful landscapes and still lifes, and the new work reveals the enthusiasm of a recent convert. Swollen organic tree-forms vibrate with life against broad flat areas of color or spits of land teeming with growth. Surrounded by blue expanses that fuse sky and ocean, larvalike forms clinging to the trees simultaneously suggest clouds and islands. Andrade’s decorative, sinuous lines maintain a certain flatness within the landscapes. His still lifes, however, play more with concepts of traditional perspective.

print September 1990

Ann Stautberg

Intimacy has always been a distinguishing characteristic of Ann Stautberg’s hand-colored interior photographs. One senses that she discovers her images and quickly records them. Later they are reexamined, enlarged, colored, and transformed into works ambivalently poised between large photographs and small paintings. Two images in this show are typical of Stautberg’s earlier work. In one 24-inch square image, entitled Felipe Garcia’s House, San Carlos, Chihuahua (all works 1990), light pours through a window only to be absorbed by a dense, strangely comforting darkness. A thin, brightly patterned

print March 1990

Joe Guy

Joe Guy’s paintings constitute a meditation on absence. “Volume of Hours,” 1986–88, is a series of books that open onto their own empty contents. Shelf, 1985, is a simple and elegant support for nothing. A series of small works from the past several years share the title “Homage: Deus Absconditus,” 1985–86. In each work, three pieces are hinged together like the sections of an altarpiece and covered completely with a dense, almost reflective black made of graphite and wax. There is a sense in Guy’s work that an image has been obliterated by this blackness, as though content had been consumed by

print January 1990

Ed Blackburn

Ed Blackburn’s bible paintings place us in a quandary because of their seeming straightforwardness. Few modes of discourse are as instantly suspect. Politicians, evangelists, and advertisers have hopelessly compromised their earnestness in public address. Since these works look at first glance like blowups of the simple illustrations in Sunday-school workbooks, it is possible that the artist is somehow serious about all this. This instantly makes the viewer—this viewer, anyway—suspicious.

Blackburn does not tackle major theological mysteries in these paintings. He forgoes the nativity, crucifixion,

print November 1989

Susan Harrington

Dissolution is both a technique and a theme for Susan Harrington. She favors the diptych format, usually making one of the images a face seen close-up. Many of these she renders loosely, which leaves them blurred, fading into or out of our awareness. Harrington also employs cross-hatching to suggest the art historical sources of some of her figures, but at times she lets even that dissolve into an indistinct pattern. In When Pairs Conspire, 1989, tiny figures placed against the landscape seem on the verge of being swallowed up. Their small outlines appear as generalized silhouettes.

Film terms

print October 1989

Lance Letscher

There is an exaggerated permanence about most of Lance Letscher’s work. In several pieces, he coats everyday objects in thin sheets of lead, preserving them so totally that they are rendered useless and anonymous Tricycle, 1988, presents a found child’s toy that has been completely encased by Letscher with a compulsive thoroughness. The small Wheelchair, 1989, is fabricated from found scraps of pipe, sheet metal, and toy wheels. Unlike the tricycle, it could conceivably be used, although it is so tiny it would be suited only for some sort of bizarre game. Letscher carries fabrication a step

print February 1989

Gregory Horndeski

Gregory Horndeski is a self-taught painter who puts his professional training in mathematics and science to good use in his new “Physics Series,” 1988. The paintings, with such titles as Studying Elementary Particles on a Summer Day, 1988, and Thoughts upon a Bouncing Universe, 1988, have wide black frames covered with white-painted text by the artist. On Coming to Grips with Gravity, 1988, he writes, “On this frame I discuss just about everything I know about gravity.” Horndeski proceeds to write nearly 1000 words on the theories of Newton, Einstein, and others. The text not only covers the

print November 1988

Doug MacWithey

At the center of this exhibition was a large wooden construction titled An Incomplete Map of Limbo, 1988—three open-ended, rectangular plywood boxes coated in a flat, nondescript house paint. A paint line still shows where the wood has been joined together. Once-functional nails protrude needlessly and somewhat menacingly from a few of the boxes, which are joined roughly with strips of unpainted lumber and pieces of a wooden crate. The whole contraption was hung from the ceiling by heavy wires, touching the gallery floor at one end and arcing improbably across the room. The piece demonstrates

Charles Dee Mitchell