Several years ago, during the genesis of Los Angeles’ studio and gallery district, among the delightful and memorable signs of life downtown were the outdoor painted sites of Maura Sheehan. Her pastel stripes, brightly painted parking lots, and polka-dotted curbs were the fine-tuned grace notes in a growing chorus of optimistic renewal. Locating itself wherever and whenever it pleased, now boldly covering an open expanse of asphalt, then slowly and calmly making its way around an obscure corner between tall buildings, her work helped to make us aware of the beauties and peculiarities of downtown Los Angeles. Finding it, witnessing the work appear and disappear in the stream of graphic warnings and instructions, we had a sense of exhilaration akin to the experience of seeing a flower emerge through a crack in the pavement. Sheehan’s art bore some resemblance to graffiti and she operated in the hit-and-run style of a guerrilla, but her touch was so warm and graceful that the work became as beautiful as it was brave.
Sheehan has moved on to New York and now leads the bicoastal life so common among Southern Californian artists. Her recent installation here gave her former audience an opportunity to see the changes in her style and approach since those early downtown days. This time she was working within a primarily sculptural situation, that of a 35-foot-long telephone pole run through the central axis of a small, semiurban gallery. Suspended at about waist level, it effectively dominated the space, making it impassable except for a comfortable parallel corridor at the left side of the entrance. Some have described the gallery as being “impaled” by the rough, weathered pole, but the effect, though stark, did not seem at all violent. Rather, the optical effects of segments interrupted by walls and windows served to fragment the pole and make parts of it seem weightless and to be levitating in space. This impression changed at certain points in the room, especially where the edges of Sheehan’s carefully cut circles in drywall embraced the pole and allowed it to pass through it and into the space beyond. The era of Minimalist installation art has come and gone for the moment, and the purely spatial and architectonic aspects of this piece were perhaps not among its most telling and persuasive features. There was, however, enough of Sheehan’s old music, the joyful irreverence of it, to make this effort worthwhile.
—Susan C. Larsen
