The opening reception will be Friday January 14th from 5-8 pm. I'll give an informal artist's talk at 5 pm that night. Stop by if you are in the area. I will also try to be around for the Friday January 7th soft opening during friday night art walk in Burlington. The title of my show alludes to the influence of drawing on this new body of work ( even though there are no drawings in this show) and the title alludes to the efficient systems of structural support used in these pieces. All the time I've spent building and designing structures has inevitably had an impact on my art. I consider these new installations a continuation of my "landscape" works . Instead of responding to a landscape outdoors, I am building a couple of landscapes within the Gallery walls. The installations evolved from my continuing interest in the human tendency to overlay the landscape with geometric systems in an effort to impose order . I enjoy the "Middle Ground" that Leo Marx speaks of in his great book, The Machine in the Garden. This middle ground moment occurs when culture and nature exert an equal force on a place , each shaping the other in an aesthetic of coexistence which Marx speaks of as the true definition of the pastoral.
I've been crocheting in the past few weeks as I prepare "Surface Tension" for the front Gallery on Church Street. There will be a counterweight system supporting it and I have work to do connecting the elements with more crochet at the floor level. It's coming along. I'm using a "Fillet Crochet " technique to make a cellular pattern. I vary the size of the 'cell" creating subtle tonal shifts in the work. I like this approach because the piece is so graphic, the line quality so evident with this play of positive and negative space at my disposal. I could almost write binary code with this technique. Of course the open cells and radiating lines and grids also remind me of computer drawings. The handmade and the digital all wrapped up . I do use computer graphics as well as hand drawing to rough out the shapes and general approach to the installation.
Also in the slide show are a few details of the second installation which will be in the show titled " Points of View". This work is made of poles configured in a web of tetrahedrons on which reflective blue tape is mounted in fragments at a level, creating a tenuous shimmering plane . The hidden order within this "landscape" is only visible from a certain point of view.
[slideshow]
Thank you to the Vermont Community Foundation, Arts Endowment Fund for the grant which supported the creation of this new work.