Regional Reviews

MASSACHUSETTS

HallSpace Gallery • Dorchester, MA
www.hallspace.org • February 2–March 1, 2008 and March 8–April 12, 2008

LEAH PIEPGRAS: EUPHORIA AND A.E. RYAN: SWIMMING NEXT TO THE WATER

Leah Piepgras, You Are All I Ever Wanted, acrylic on panel, 37 x 40", 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

HallSpace inaugurated its new exhibition gallery at 950 Dorchester Avenue earlier this year with back-to-back exhibitions that offered the ultimate contrast of sensibilities, iconography, and technique. Leah Piepgras’s pyrotechnical paintings reached for the stars to express the ineffable states of ecstasy, orgasm, and bliss, while A.E. Ryan’s colorful, sensual collages were quiet meditations on form, texture, and the beauty of distressed materials.

Piepgras floats pairs of perfect, disembodied teeth in lush, vivid spaces; imagery that simultaneously rockets us high into the cosmic soup and plunges us deep into the neural networks of pleasure. Waves, lines, and tremors of energy explode outward from them like a Fourth of July fireworks display. For some, the eyes are the windows of the soul. For Piepgras, the mouth is an open portal to pleasure. While intended to suggest a physical perception of something intangible, the airborne dentures are, nevertheless, difficult imagery. They alternately suggest, at best, something curiouser and curiouser, like the fading smile of the Cheshire Cat, or at worst, something sinister, voracious, and macabre. In this series, the dental imagery works best when understated and submerged in the swirling loops of sensation.

A.E. Ryan’s exhibition of colorful collages was assembled from a wide variety of discarded building material gathered during a fourmonth stay on St. Kitts as a Fulbright Scholar. Utilizing weathered, distressed plywood, corrugated cardboard, wire, bits of string, and rusty nails, Ryan has created a series of collages united by an architectural theme. They appear to be abstract recreations of humble, domestic structures patched together with inexpensive materials, enlivened by a typically Caribbean sense of color and verve. Bright colors and contrasting textures belie the poverty of materials, the makeshift construction, and reflect the sun, the warmth, the music, and the irrepressible joie de vivre obvious to anyone enamored of Caribbean culture. While their inspiration seems obvious, the collages stand on their own as abstract, lyrical variations of shape, texture, color, and materials.

In launching a new exhibition space by pairing these two very different artists, John Colan, director of HallSpace, has skillfully orchestrated the allegro and adagio of a visual symphony whose concluding movements will be anticipated with great interest.

—Raymond Liddell

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