Sculpture show carves creative niche
Unless you’ve been avoiding art shows for the past 20 years or so, you know that contemporary art is no longer about just painting, or printmaking, drawing, photography or sculpture.
The old separations between 2-D and 3-D have steadily eroded, a trend that has evolved along the lines similar to the increasingly missing boundaries between fine art and craft.
It’s no longer unusual to see an art exhibit that contains works made up of such disparate and unusual materials as cardboard paper towel rolls; a monitor showing the artist creating a painting, erasing it and creating another painting, erasing that, and so on; a work that combines not only drawing, painting, printmaking and photography, but also ceramics, metalsmithing, glassblowing, and as if that weren’t enough, a soundtrack thrown in for good measure.
It’s the Wal-Mart effect: every medium you ever wanted to see all in one place.
As Parsisson notes in his curator’s statement, ”contemporary sculpture has few if any agreed-upon boundaries or defining characteristics and often seems to defy attempts at definition.”
So Parsisson set about to assemble an all-sculpture show, the first to be exhibited at Summit Artspace, but one that’s less complex, more approachable than some of those encountered at contemporary art museums and galleries.
”It was a traditional curating,” Parsisson noted. ”I invited artists to participate. I had sent out a call for artists who did three-dimensional work, and from that I just built an image in my head of the show I wanted to do.
There are 29 works in the show, ranging from traditional sculptural materials such as stone, ceramics, wood and metal to less traditional media such as wax, cloth and found objects.
Budd, for instance, created five small wax sculptures, not molded, but carved from blocks of variously tinted wax and adorned with pins, gold leaf, cord, hair, copper mesh, synthetic pearls and a fishhook. It’s mind-blowing to try to imagine how she managed to weave copper wire, for instance, over the delicate surface of a wax form without scratching it.
Depending on your frame of reference, you may see in these works allusions to women’s work, female adornment or a feminized version of African fetish objects. Or perhaps all three in various measure.
In this, Budd’s work epitomizes the qualities that Parsisson sought for the show: ”The best art operates on at least two levels; first as an engaging presence that captures our attention; and second as a portal that asks us to look beyond itself to some larger, transcendent truth. A truth that we must often discover for ourselves.”
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