Tentative
Balance
Mixed-media
installation by Abigail Pierce; drawings and paintings by
Kathleen Brandau
Macri
Gallery, 2324 SE Division St., 238-1523
Aside from the cluster of shops around Nature's and the
Flying Saucer Cafe, a walk down Southeast Division Street
still offers an expansive and refreshingly unpretty view:
auto shops; a used-bike shop; a scrappy antique store or
two; an adult movie theater. And an art gallery.
For the past couple of years, the Macri Gallery has been
quietly asserting its presence on Division. The framing
shop and gallery occupy an old computer-repair shop. The
two-level gallery opens up from the frame shop, which displays
a mixed bag of paintings and prints. Both the upstairs and
downstairs let in plenty of natural light. The gallery usually
focuses on the fairly traditional genres of landscape and
figure. But this month's show of sculptures by Abigail Pierce
and drawings and paintings by Kathleen Brandau is a knockout.
The pairing of Pierce's sculpture and Brandau's drawings
and paintings at first appears incongruous. Pierce's sculpture
is large and abstract, Brandau's two-dimensional work small
and tightly rendered. But the poetic sense of stillness
in both bodies of work, coupled with the attention to craft,
works to link them together.
Pierce's sculptures consist of large, airy latex pod forms
restrained in various wire and wood contraptions. Pods
and Grids, the only downstairs piece, resembles a giant
tic-tac-toe grid. Its wooden frame holds a grid of wire
in which pods made of large, latex-wrapped balloons are
ensnared like plastic Safeway bags caught in a fence.
Pods and Grids is arresting. It has a hushed quality--an
eerie stillness. The pods convey a palpable sense of a landed
fish gasping, or of a bird's ribcage rising and falling
as it breathes. These delicate beings hang in precarious
relationship to the sharp tensile strength of the grid and
wire.
Up the stairs, you are confronted with a large untitled
piece. A round wooden frame contains a star-shaped lattice
of wires. Dead-center is a trapped pod, ridged and resembling
an egg from Alien. Like Pods and Grids, it
illustrates an ephemeral state, the essence of a thing trapped
and suspended. It could be a breath, or a thought, or an
animal snared by an invisible force. There is an edge of
cruelty to which Pierce marries a delicate, formal elegance,
striking the tentative balance that is also the show's title.
The one oddball is a column of hanging red mohair nets.
The untitled work keeps with the motif of ensnared ephemera,
but has a warmer and homier feel. At first I hated it. What
came to mind was macramé plant baskets. But the more
I looked at it, the more it grew on me. Each net contains
a clear glass globe, and each is attached at four corners
to a wire that is pulled to the floor by lead weights, tilting
the viewer's impression toward fishing buoys and away from
'70s handicraft. The weights, wire and nets all conspire
to suggest a metaphysical fishing expedition.
A different sort of metaphysical quest is clearly taking
place in the small, lovely drawings of Kathleen Brandau.
Her exacting and surreal graphite renderings give a glimpse
into a private and often painful world. Many of the small
drawings are dreamy still-lifes--a collection of garden
tools in which the hand fork is literally a clawed hand,
or common household objects animated and floating in the
corners of rooms.
Like Pierce's sculptures, these drawings capture a stilled
moment. They are like sepia-toned photographs, inherently
forlorn and nostalgic. Subterfuge depicts a windblown
leaf snagged by a branch. The branch (or is it the leg of
an insect?) arises out of a huge fissure in the earth. The
landscape in which the leaf blows is parched, desolate and
cracked. Time stops at the moment the leaf's journey is
stalled by the obstacle.
Brandau's craft is an asset in the graphite drawings, but
in the few paintings, which are newer, it actually does
the work a disservice. The graphite's smoky chiaroscuro
of gun-metal tones adds depth to her illustrative renderings.
But in the paintings, the light and dark is gone, and the
color is too confectionary and hard-edged. In time, perhaps,
they will take on the same depth of shadow as exists in
the drawings. The drawings are absolutely compelling, small
poems in and of themselves. The paintings just need an injection
of varied tones.
Both Brandau and Pierce bring a highly skilled craft to
their work. On top of the craft, they add a deep layer of
thoughtfulness. If you haven't been to Macri, now is the
time to go and see this successful pairing. If this caliber
of work continues, then Division Street may have just found
its first visual-arts pioneers.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 26,
2000
|
