'Fine Art of Craft' More than whimsy
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William Cathey's "Wooden Bowls" Jeb Wallace-Brodeur/Times Argus |
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By Anne Galloway Times Argus Staff - Published: May 5, 2006
The pragmatic arts are getting full billing at Studio Place Arts in Barre. And the Christmas shopping season is a mere seven months away.
Perhaps that's why the arts and crafts items on display in the main gallery through May 28 are even more esoteric than usual. The "Fine Art of Craft" is, as the name suggests, heavy on the arts and lighter on craft. The works just barely straddle the Maginot line between your typical handmade fare and genuine art. That is to say, the specialties a la maison this month fall in the lovely but marginally useful category.
You probably think I'm about to whip out the word whimsy just about now, but I'm thankful to report that I can't, in good conscience, put that flimsy little descriptive to use. But here are some other labels that do apply: quirky, ingenuous and even, on occasion, austere.
The 25 artisans in the show ply the usual materials in surprising ways. There is a three-dimensional image-shifting quilt sculpture, a table and set of chairs made from fired ceramics, and an industrial-sized teapot that looks as though it could serve an army of X-men.
The smaller shows, "Mail Art" and the "Abstract Works: Linda Maney, Erica Partington and Axel Stohlberg," on the second and third floors respectively, are worth a jaunt up the narrow flights of stairs through the old Nickels Block to see.
"Fine Art of Craft" is a well-balanced show that includes a fair representation of craft forms: stained glass, furniture making, ceramics, fabric art, hooked rugs, baskets and jewelry.
Elinor Steele's "Composition with Barns" is a wool tapestry that weaves floating barn roofs into a grey, red-edged abstract landscape.
There are a number of marginally useful teapots that are admirable works of art nonetheless. Georgia Landau has transformed a female nude and a jester in the lotus position into such vessels. Gary Godbersen's "Ring-Handled Teapot-Teagonometry" is a work of ergonomic impossibility – and that's it's charm. Why try to lift this pot apparently made for the Jolly Green Giant, when you can merely admire it?
William Cathey has carved plain wooden bowls from the Granville Bowl Mill products into intricate works of art with totemic ravens, Celtic patterns and loons. The outside of his "Iris" bowl is covered with thick buttery petals of Dutch iris blooms that look like tongues catching snowflakes.
Cindy Blakeslee's abstract sculpture, "Bits of the Earth: The Mineral Series" is a line up of six small thick cement frames filled with found objects – a door knob latch, several smooth stones, white coral. The sculptures are at once absurd and poetic.
"Mail Art" on the second floor is a display of performance art. Gabrielle Dietzel, Axel Stohlberg and Nicholas Hecht among other central Vermont artists, make pieces from almost anything – tea trays, old Halloween masks, marshmallow peeps, old brown gloves – and send it through the post without bothering to put it in a box of any sort. The resulting stamp becomes part of the artwork.
The abstract works on the third floor are remarkably compatible pieces by a trio of artists. Stohlberg's by now recognizable architectural abstractions are pleasingly primitive outlines of houses floating in ambiguous landscapes. Partington's small mixed media works are interior spaces created from pencil, additive materials like wax, paint and even onion skin. Maney's paintings are bright, if pedestrian, geometric arrangements.