NEWPORT NEWS
THE PENINSULA Fine Arts Center's juried biennial exhibition is always a much-anticipated forum for recent art. The net is cast wide for this show, so it is expected to bring news of developments in the fine arts beyond Hampton Roads.
Everything depends on the juror, who gets to select from all submissions and award prizes to those who made it into the show. The judge this time around was Mark Richard Leach, executive director of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C. He's a heavyweight in North Carolina, having also been a founding director of the Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte.
This year, 177 artists from 19 states entered, and 84 artists from 16 states got in with 113 artworks.
Judging from his choices, this man has incredibly catholic tastes, incorporating works that come out of such diverse traditions as minimalism, pop art and regionalism. Leach doesn't seem to be pushing any particular direction, except perhaps a sense of good craftsmanship and a smart approach in regard to the various styles.
His top pick was ceramicist Laurie Gaethe of Ocean Springs, Miss., whose tabletop-scaled porcelain piece mixes figures from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" that appear to have been created with a commercial mold. Since Gaethe made no attempt to disguise the mold marks, the idea of figurines must be presumed to be part of the content.
Appropriate to its title, "Dreams of Wonderland," the forms are fantastically blended. A monkey sleeps on the back of a rabbit; a saddled lion emerges from its chest, and a cat from its feet.
The show varies in tone from Gaethe's tongue-in-cheek irony to the Southern Gothic melodrama of Sarah Hazlegrove of Roanoke, a photographer who uses black-and-white infrared film to capture dim images of spooky spots.
In "Bus Stop I," Hazlegrove shot a collection of truncated trees with a bush of foliage softening the branch silhouettes. Each tree resembles a dramatically expressive figure, perhaps a Martha Graham dancer. When you finally discern that one of the trunks is a crucifix, the trees then seem like mourners.
Another photographer, Robert Silance of Pendleton, S.C., takes a cool, sharply focused approach in documenting the Southern rural landscape as graceful vistas being replaced by ugly roads and buildings.
There's a lot of strong sculpture and painting in the show. Jason Lanka's enigmatic "Leonard" seems to refer to the taming of the West. The artist was raised in Wyoming and wrote in his artist's statement that the piece is about boundaries. The large-scale, finely crafted work could be interpreted as bending a tree trunk to the will of man and locking it into a contraption.
In the same way that Lanka's design gives the illusion of a bent trunk, James Parker's humorous yet elegant sculpture "Seagulls in the Living Room" makes a concrete form appear as malleable as rubber.
Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com
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