I'm done! Just finished up yesterday afternoon. We added reflective tape to posts and trees in city hall park, extending the "shimmering blue waterline" in my installation "Points of View" out into the great landscape beyond the gallery walls. The lighting and final labeling of the show will be completed by the Gallery staff this week. Keep in mind that the photos posted here are quick shots taken by me at the end of a long day without finished lighting. I include below the content of a review of my work written by my friend Andy Sichel, artist and a former professor of art at Rutger's University.He very generously surprised me with this a couple of days ago, sending his remarks out via e-mail to his community.
I have watched my brilliant friend Alisa's work as a sculptor and draftswoman evolve and mature over more than a decade now and I wanted to share this with you all.
Her work is informed by her feminist consciousness, her "day jobs" as a Yale trained architect, teacher at Norwich University (VT) and as the mother of two quickly growing children.
Alisa's work melds a thorough and considered understanding of art history with the tenacity of sticking with an initially wise and equally considered choice of "art parents" whom I see as extending from Shamanism through the Artisanal and site specific works of the middle ages, the Utopian visionary, architecturally schooled sculptors and painters of the High Renaissance and Mannerist periods into Dada and Surrealism, the Bio-morphism of Archile Gorky/ Abstract Impressionism, early Modernist architecture (and Meret Oppenheim) ,and the obvious continuing thread of her visually acknowledged Feminist and late Modernist "mother" Eva Hesse, whose mere five year tragically abbreviated career staked fervent ground for many lesser and some (older) peer women sculptors like Jacquie Windsor whose work because of its materials and apparent lack of feminist content is sometimes seen as at odds with more avowedly feminist work like Judy Chicago's Dinner Party.
However as women artists continue to be hugely under-represented it seems to me that any woman artist who manages to be seen and acknowledged becomes "Feminist" by virtue of being available as a model of a still marginalized minority. Dworsky's crocheted rope sculptures are certainly per se more avowedly feminist than Louise Bopurgeois' or Alice Aycock's work yet their process and scale share the more traditionally "male" muscularity of these more celebrated women artists. Alisa's sculpture has in the past decade spoken to art's role in relation to architecture and/or environment and I'm particularly impressed with the maturation of the crucial component of a cognitive and affective personal visual/conceptual vocabulary in her work. This is what elevates innovative good art, which nominally contributes to the ongoing contemporary art/philosophy discourse (which is sometimes a lot of noise) to art which whilst doing that, echoes above the clamor to a sustained intriguing and ultimately mysterious conversation which is not happening with the intent of an elitist mystification but which invites us in, as with Joseph Cornell's work, and transcends the nuts and bolts de rigeur covered bases to, with luck, become part of the larger enduring historical discourse.
Please share this around!
Best to you and Brava Alisa!
Andy
(Andy Sichel)