Spotlight Reviews

RHODE ISLAND

South County Art Association/Kingston
www.southcountyart.org
FIVE RHODE ISLAND ARTISTS 2006

Jason Fong, Rufus: The Battleshrimp, sculpture.

The signature show at the South County Art Association would benefit from more elbow room and some cutting, but the eclectic quintet of Rhode Island artists featured here is engaging enough to forgive the clutter. Anna Galloway Highsmith’s functional terracotta pieces are highly textured, whimsical, and decorative. She exhibits a playful streak with her doll’s neighborhood of Nine Houses and marries aesthetic with form and function in works like Vase for Five Flowers, Four Spoons on Two Stands, and Four Cups in Black and Honey. The grouping of eight pieces is visually pleasing and tactile, while indirectly evoking the sense of taste (cups and spoons) and scent (flower vase).

Marked by color and pattern that combines a contemporary style with echoes of primitive art and symbols, Highsmith’s pieces share space with surreal, psychedelic photographs by Michael Rossi, who captures chemical reactions and their resulting vivid colors and shapes made during the process of melting glass. Many scenes are grouped together, producing a kaleidoscope of images, whirling pinwheel rainbows of color from places no larger than the head of a pin buried within layers of solid glass.

All of the works are untitled, but a sense of fantasy pervades as color leaks and coalesces into geometric forms. Jason Fong’s soda-fired stoneware evokes Captain Nemo and those dark places of fantasy and the deep sea. His character of Rufus: The Battleshrimp is given slightly different decoration in surface color and form, but retains its curved armored seashell pose throughout. Amusing and otherworldly, nine separate Rufus creatures, with their whirling details of tube-and-spout shapes, clamshells and occasional tusk-like antennae, occupy the space with a chess set and board of original playing pieces.

Mara Metcalf, View Facing West, ink and acrylic on paper.

Merle Mainelli Poulton’s Dick and Jane series, painted in oils, alludes to those old homogenous primary readers that Americans of a certain age were introduced to when they first tried to make sense out of words. Her paintings are wordless but storytelling still comes through the canvas, as bicycle-tricycle-chariot shapes with “heads” of tangled ribbon engage in various activities.

Three scenes titled Look and See, Eat, and Oh stand out. In each, the chariot forms imbue personality, taking on human characteristics in their abstract circumstances. The wheels suggest individual liberty and freedom. The noodle-shaped ribbons have the look of brain matter. And evocative color choices inform each of the works, creating emotional resonance, as in the blue rain painting Oh, which in its despairing mood and noir-ish vision has the apocalyptic feel of Bladerunner. Altered landscapes presented in abstract form by Mara Metcalf offer remote views of contemporary sprawl as cartographer’s calligraphy and primal mark-making. Titles like View of the Point, View Looking East, and West View of the Point emphasize the importance of angle of vision in each work, serving to distinguish one picture or reality from another. Through her rendering of gridlock, roads, cul de sacs, developments, and landscape contours, Metcalf maps the modern human journey, tracing its sprawl and its emptiness, revealing the organic patterns inherent even in careless progress.
Doug Norris