Reviews: Massachusetts

Anna Hepler: Intricate Universe
Montserrat Gallery at Montserrat College of Art • Beverly, MA • www.montserrat.edu • Through October 17, 2009

Maine artist Anna Hepler’s show in the Montserrat Gallery features three miniature dioramas, a site-specific sculptural installation, and a selection of woodblock prints.

Backlit and installed in holes cut into the wall, Hepler’s elegantly executed, shoebox-sized Projection Rooms are maquettes for installations. The tiny plastic figures in them illustrate the massive scale of these imagined works. In Flock (1) and Flock (2), the illusion of flying forms receding in space is achieved with a set of delicate ink drawings on plexiglass, placed one behind another. In Fall, Scatter, Float, bits of paper, skewered on vertically-angled threads, are configured in a loose sphere. Hepler’s deft alchemy transforms the ordinary—thread, paper, plexiglass, and ink—into a magical stagecraft.

Arrest, Array, an organic, Tinkertoy-like lattice structure suspended from the ceiling, inhabits nearly half the gallery. It was constructed in situ from stainless steel rods of varying lengths and small black PVC discs with holes, into which the rods are hooked. The lengths were fashioned into triangles, and then into triangular pyramids, before being added to the burgeoning form. Simultaneously large and ethereal, it suggests nests, spider webs, or complex molecular structures. The ingenious modular construction is reminiscent of the geodesics of Buckminster Fuller, but unlike his domes, the geometry of Arrest, Array is intuitively asymmetrical.

Asymmetry also defines Hepler’s prints; some of their overlapping latticed forms bring to mind the work of Terry Winters, but in a more minimal vein. Despite their intricacy, these images retain an understated looseness. The prints in Hepler’s Wolfecut series hang in a grid on a wall at one end of the gallery and are flanked on adjacent walls by her Lattice series. Some are reduction prints—in which a block is carved and printed, then recut and printed again. She also prints on the back of the translucent Japanese paper, muting both hue and texture. In more traditional printmaking, successive blocks are registered in the same location, but Hepler moves hers around the paper in an intriguing, almost sculptural way. The same intelligent combination of the premeditated and the improvised informs both her prints and installation.

—Anne Krinsky

Carol Gove: Lineage
Judi Rotenberg Gallery, Boston, MA • www.judirotenberg.com • Through October 11, 2009

Lineage, Carol Gove’s solo exhibition, features mixed-media works that examine the elusiveness of ancestry. The work, which is reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters, Richard Diebenkorn, and Helen Fankenthaler, recapitulates formal interests in abstraction and geometry, in translucence and layering, and in delicately wrought and built surfaces. But the images in Lineage also signal a more overtly personal excavation in progress: swatches of personally suggestive ephemera—text, photos, ad copy, and handwritten documents—are strategically collaged into this new work.

Paintings like Composure and Dinner Party point to Gove’s ambiguous place not only within her own family line, but within that of women artists in general. Both pieces contain found materials that are cropped, reversed, painted over, and otherwise secreted within the formal compositions. For instance, just off Composure’s center and buried beneath a layer of neutral, pale pigment is the ghostly presence of a sewing pattern. There is also a fragment of a word (nona), as in Picasso’s word jou, that eludes us. We stand before the picture, puzzling over the presence of a nona or grandmother—denizen of a bygone world of handcrafts and feminine arts—is both the subtext and the conflict of this picture. After all, a work like Composure is impossibly positioned between feminized bourgeois society and the patriarchal world of high art. As such, Gove interrogates the relationship of polite, self-effacing composure and assertive composition. In a closely related picture, Dinner Party, Gove’s allusion to Judy Chicago’s icon of feminism confirms this theme and teases out more of the questions posed in Composure. Here Gove suggests that what we know about dinner parties comes not only from our mothers and grandmothers, but from the familiar ventriloquies of our “other” mothers: artists like Virginia Woolf and Judy Chicago. In Lineage, Gove puts us before a palimpsest that is by its very nature cryptic and melancholy. Looking into the work, we think of the faces of children that sometimes turn spectral in their ability to manifest and conceal the features of dimly known forebears.

– Rane Hall