Artist's REVIEWS
Newsday, November 3, 1995, By Margaret
Moorman
A Full Palette of Talent Arrayed
in Smithtown.
Twentieth Annual Juried Fine Arts Exhibition
Presented through Nov. 26 by the Smithtown
Townships Arts Council at the Mills Pond house, 660 Route 25A, Smithtown,
Open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, noon-4pm and Saturday
and Sunday.
Large group shows like this one, in which
51 disparate artworks vie for attention, offer something for everyone,
though in the cacophony of styles, colors, sizes and mediums, the more
contemplative works could easily get lost.
A viewer has to take time to find and appreciate
even the work of the first-prize winner, Louise Weinberg, whose two
medium-sized, nearly monochromatic tablets of etched and inked copper
over wood have a quiet presence. It takes patience to make out their
subtly drawn images; such as "For the Moment of Skin to Skin," spelled
out above drawings of hands forming the letters in sign language.
Another understated but authoritative work
is "Ecotone: Reye," by Cynthia Stone. Listing her materials as "aluminum,
oil and acrylic," Stone exhibits a tall, abstract rectangle made out
of three or four sheets of window-screen stained with swathes of paint
and then layered with their edges meeting precisely, building up less
than half an inch of depth. Viewed from different angles, the surface
has a tide like, rippling effect.
This is not to say that much of the more
exuberant, colorful pieces do not merit extended appreciation. The show's
judge, Jennifer Blessing of the Guggenheim Museum, has done an admirable
job of balancing different kinds of work.
For his striking, tumultuous collage, "Fetching
Fruitcake," Bruce Helander has taken a found image of a dog carrying
a wrapped parcel and placed it among many other picture fragments, torn
from old posters or other printed matter, that are eerily threatening
-- a crowd of people with raised fists, a man brandishing a club. There
is an unmistakable, menacing quality to the work, as if the ordinary,
everyday world of the cartoonish dog performing his little task is about
to turn ugly.
Susan Rappel's humorous, abstract work
on paper, "One in Nine," is full of life, with a fast-looking, loopy
line and colors that seem intentionally off, such as a flesh pink or
a brackish green. Second-place winner Helmut Amann exhibits two-multi
part, geometric wall sculptures that are bright and beautifully constructed.
Much of the natural talent on view would
lend itself successfully to illustration. Zhong Xia Chen's skillful
"Foot of the Mountain" shows an antelope resting beneath distant snow-capped
peaks; it's painted with the delicacy and naturalism seen in exhibits
at New York's American Museum of Natural History.
And Steven Manolopoulos' etching of a forest
glade with a single, glowing flower has a wide border packed with tiny
tours de force -- a classically cross-hatched sunset, Mandarin-like
abstractions, a cartoon hand. It is as if he were making a demonstration
piece to display all the styles in his quiver. Fairy tales would be
perfect subjects for someone with Manolopoulos' imagination and eye
for detail.
As in most broadly selected group shows,
there is much competent work here that is fundamentally uninteresting
--- nicely drawn figure studies, still life’s of gleaming fruit, sunny
landscapes. However, there are also a few pieces that are just the opposite,
by practitioners who appear untrained but who possess the important
advantage of strong feeling and complicated ideas.
The most striking of these is "Confusion,"
a large gouache teeming with figures by Helene Baum. A devil-like creature
in the center seems to exude shapes like cartoon speech-balloons. Inside
these are topsy-turvy scenes of children swinging or people on a park
bench; it's as if they have been blown off-kilter by a sudden wind.
Outside the balloons, ghostly beings float in a midnight-blue fog. Though
awkwardly drawn, the figures show a determination that gives them a
monumental aspect. Like Helander, Baum is exploring the uncertainties
of everyday life and coming to terms with a world in which what is pleasant
and secure one minute may disappear the next.