Spotlight Reviews

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Shiao-Ping Wang, Koan (detail), acrylic, 24 x 48", 2005.

  Art objects speak beauty to viewers, and presumably in groups they talk among themselves. The statements made in the paintings and sculptures in this exhibition comprise Jared Tuveson's and Caitlyn Cedarstrom's exclamations, Nick Park's sedate dramas, Adam Pearson's debate between funky and formal, and Shiao-Ping Wang's sophisticated articulations. Brash contrasts in Tuveson's sculpture, Descend-Collide, put steel rods splashing from a plaster base. Cedarstrom's painting, Mother #1, wallows in rawness. Park's gestural still lifes wax romantic; in his somber, clever etching, March, bottles lean in unison across their shadows. The wild yellow spiral of Pearson's steel sculpture, Extension #12, argues against the composure of his minimal "Formscapes," reliefs that move off their square moorings with calculated risk. With less surprise than a more convoluted process could incite, Down the Tube imitates the action of pinball, while Crank better merges form and function to embody machine.
  Wang's circumspect abstraction holds forth throughout the room. If the finest art denies full disclosure in order to draw viewers in, then her subtle loquaciousness dominates this conversation. The various voices of her visual counterpoint organize around geometry like chords on the staff of a musical score. Koan's square halves are subdivided twice, its permeating grid giving in to transparency in places and obliging the build-up of misaligned layers of collaged, stenciled, scraped, and painted pattern. Looking into the painting as if into a pond, space and attention shift as textural dislocation and elegant broken color harmonies cohere indirectly. Surface accumulations record experience without chronology. In the airy and deep Mountains and Water, thematic dialogue is layered onto the diptych structure, each realm's exploration leaving its lexicon in its wake. As if charted from a distance, the searching layers of City by the Sea take shape topographically, moving tentatively toward comprehension.

Adam Pearson, Yellow Ribbon, steel, 62 x 36 x 33".

  The influence of the grid structure and visual nature of Wang's native Chinese versus the opaque English alphabet, and the ineffable transitions between them, is evident in this capacious work. Painterly calligraphic characters take their time, requiring some degree of musing in execution and interpretation. Connections among thinking, writing, and painting into Wang's methodology is reinforced by the commas, semicolons, dashes, etc., that intermittently punctuate her surfaces. Transformed by abstract contexts, periods become dots, spots, or circles; quotation marks expand to the shape and function of word balloons. Deciphering Red Talk's dialectical machinations, reddish squares, and grammatical symbols as political pun is not too radical.
   Small Talk colorfully toys with the notion of conversation piece and word play; its bubbles and clouds resemble stickers attached to photos for comic effect, adding a layer of postmodern high-low irony. Whether an artwork talks back, mirrors your observations, or has its own thoughts-any pattern is possible. Calmly, Wang's poetic investigations of permanence solidly assume painting's basic meditative function. Acrylic is coaxed to the slow feel of oils to let reconsideration trump clarity of purpose, a wandering full of fruitful hesitation. Viewing becomes excavation; large mesmerizing moves passing across the surface of Mapping become metaphors for and evidence of this still rich exercise of the curious eye, careful hand, and expansive, revising mind. Margaret McCann