Past Shows

ICONS
7.19.07 - 9.2.07
Will Tenney, Lisa Tang Liu, Nancy Popper and David Colombo

An icon can be anything from an object of devotion to a symbol for qualities we endeavor to recognize. Works by four artists currently showing at 13FOREST Gallery explore this range of meaning through printmaking, painting and photography. The show, appropriately titled ICONS, on exhibit through September 27, features local artists Will Tenney, Lisa Tang Liu, Nancy Popper and David Colombo. Running concurrently with ICONS is Summer Garden Series, a continuation of painter Adele Travisano's sumptuous oil studies of life in her garden.

One object of devotion in ICONS is the venerable Eiffel Tower. Originally on the cutting edge of Modernist architecture, over time it has been abhorred, then admired and then inextricably linked with French nationalism. Today the tower's image is so commonplace that sometimes it is difficult for us to comprehend why the structure caused an uproar when it was built in 1889. Through the lens of Will Tenney's camera the tower regains its beauty and wonder - it is new again. In six nighttime color studies, the artist uses a slow shutter to flood the tower in its own light and in the incidental light of buildings, street lamps and passing cars. Across the series the tower becomes increasingly dynamic until in La Tour de la Nuit #7 it disappears into an abstraction of brilliant color spinning on an axis. Viva la France indeed!

In contrast to the tower study's dynamism is Lisa Tang Liu's series of tinted, gold-framed phototransfers, most of which started out as photographs she took in 2002 while visiting mainland China and her childhood home in Hong Kong. In six images Liu captures portions of Asia's cultural history with subtle editorial deftness, and combines it with the personal history of her family. A golden, sculpted lion in Kirin Atop Pacific Peak suggests the ubiquity of Chinese political authority, and the blue Tsim Sa Tsui Clock Tower exposes the stamp of British colonialism still borne by Hong Kong. Yet from this crush of historical iconography, Liu's grandmother looks out at the viewer silently, chin on hands. From her pose and the solemnity of the photographs surrounding her one might guess that she too was unmoved and immovable. Liu quietly smashes that presumption, however, when the viewer leans over and realizes the title of her grandmother's portrait is Chinese Flapper.

Though ICONS is not meant to be a travelogue, one could get that impression by moving from Tenney's and Liu's work to the copper-plate etchings of Nancy Popper. In Untitled Popper presents a jocular scene of six figures, some of which are reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs with their human bodies and animal heads. There seems to be a language going on, but what is it? Popper's characters cannot be bothered by such a question; it would only interrupt the sheer bliss of their world. This joy spills into each of Popper's prints, particularly in her abstract studies of female acrobats who dance, jump and hang in midair. In Circus I each character is pared down to a few lines, each basic to the profile of women's bodies in action. Again language is suggested, this time by the shape of Roman letters to which the characters are contorting their bodies. This is not a literary language but one of joy and the simple exuberance of movement.

David Colombo (who was recently selected for Tufts University Art Gallery's Fourth Annual Juried Summer Exhibition) takes abstract form into fantastical directions with a series of etched landscapes teeming with life. As animated as a Bosch landscape, Colombo's world of primitive icons that could be animal, vegetable or somewhere in between generate a din by interacting with one another beneath pagoda-like trees. In Landscape #1 and Landscape #2 this energy is undiminished even though the life forms walk upon the earth in single, orderly grids. This tension between energy and stability gives way entirely in Colombo's smallest print, Seascape. On a choppy ocean human figures float along the hull of an ark full of people chaotically shooting arrows into the air and flailing their arms as if to convey a wartime directive. Making matters worse, an ominous, stylized shark circles the ark and on the horizon another ark appears. As in the great nineteenth-century painting Watson and the Shark, the viewer is taken into the middle of a story; the difference is that Colombo's has yet to be written.

Adele Travisano: Summer Garden Series To study any of Adele Travisano's landscapes is to understand a philosophical statement she has made in various ways throughout her career as a painter. Beauty is not created by objects in the world; it is in the objects themselves. Summer Garden Series is a continuation of Travisano's long-running observations of the small garden she tends at her home in Medford. In the past she has captured the glow of flowers at dusk, the complexity of objects shading one another in bright light, and color, simply color, that defines the feeling rather than the appearance of life. It has always been the same garden, but never a garden painted twice.

In Summer Garden Series Travisano presents two large canvases and five smaller ones that ostensibly have as their subject phlox, an electric but short-blooming summer flower. In brilliant, gestural strokes of oil, the surface of each painting seems nearly incapable of holding the energy Travisano sensed while standing in the daylight of her yard. In her larger paintings, Summer Light and Phlox Along the Fence, complementary combinations of blue and orange, red and green, and purple and yellow are painted one atop the other to form a matrix of plant stems and foliage. The paintings' flower petals might seem impossibly white in a different context; but here they soothe the eye and keep the composition tethered to the concept of a landscape.

Travisano's smaller paintings are painted in cooler blues, greens and purples, and their flower petals burst from their canvases like popcorn. Within the context of the two larger works, these read like small meditations. Nonetheless they show that no matter how small a piece of earth might be, it has an inherent, comprehensible beauty.