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New visions

Hera Gallery turns things Inside Out

by Bill Rodriguez

INSIDE OUT: SIX INDEPENDENT ARTISTS. Works by Erin Flood, Jerry Mischak, Saima Mussani, Janet Passehl, Gil Scullion, and Lydia van Nostrand. At Hera Gallery, Wakefield, through April 28.

"Gossipium Hirsutum," by Lydia van Nostrand

Inside Out: Six Independent Artists, the thoughtful show currently at Hera Gallery, is subtitled "New ways of seeing or approaching nature, culture or both." Painting with quite a broad brush, it sounds like. Yet when these diverse works are together, they bump and jostle and all but converse out loud with one another about the influence of the created world on the natural world, and vice-versa.

Half the artists use organic materials, making the link to nature most directly. Janet Passehl yanks interior and exterior together abruptly with two pieces called "House Tour." They consist of thin bark-stripped branch fragments with writing on them, mostly room-by-room descriptions of the inside of a house. As the sticks have been wrested from their living realm, so too are the words -- they are, after all, lifeless extractions from a place that is ripe with experiences. (Who says conceptual artists have no sense of humor? A single tiny word is on a thick, phallic stick: "Balzac." In this context it represents a book sighted on a bookshelf, but the notoriously priapic novelist would be pleased.)

Plucked from the natural world and made enormous are three 1998 sculptures by Lydia van Nostrand. A spiky object in brass a foot in diameter, Gossipium Hirsutum, is the shape of an enormous diatom or a grain of pollen. We don't need to know that gossipium hirsutum is the scientific name for the cotton plant to get the sense of peering into a microscope. Similarly, her two other sculptures have Latin names, but the fact that one is a fungus and the other was inspired by a rock garden plant is incidental. The former consists of hand-made paper half-spheres, and the latter is a welded copper form that celebrates undulating patterns.

The untitled objects of Erin K. Flood draw their evocative attraction from their materials and how we react to textures and juxtapositions. Even if it weren't hard to not project a fetal shape onto a curved length of puffed-up sausage casing in one piece, its delicacy contrasting against a strict grid of tiny squares would still be jarring. In another work, dozens of geode fragments affixed to a yellowish field of glass paste and petroleum jelly look from a distance like a large square of flypaper has been successful. The work is doubly tactile, both from the tacky surface and the jagged rocks, which glint against the glistening background.

Situated appropriately in the gallery to provide a transition from all that explicit organic imagery is the work of Jerry Mischak. His three contributions are each under form-fitted clear plastic, as "Vacuform Venus" (2000) proclaims. Wrapped in black tape, that piece could be a mummified silhouette of a beautiful human form, for all we can tell after the industrial-strength overlays. "Once an Important Part" (2000) contains wires as well as striated tape that looks like the ribbon wire used in computers. Here too the thick plastic keeps us as distant, as if we were looking at a photograph of an archeological dig an eon from now.

At first the intricate metal miniatures of Saima Mussani seem out of place here, in both form and content. The 1998 pieces are all titled "Memory" and given different numbers. They consist of tiny silver objects in thick-walled white boxes on the walls, a presentation that cleverly simulates and comments on the tunnel vision and clarity of memories that are precious to us. Most of the works consist of an odd juxtaposition: a toothbrush and a television set; a banana-seat kid's bike next to a pair of eyeglasses; a suitcase and packing boxes. All private associations, no more of their significances shared now than that private significance is unsharable.

But that comment on unknowability is next to artist Gil Scullion's comments on the futility of trying too hard to understand. Bringing us full circle, the subject he has under interrogation if not explication is -- you guessed it -- nature. "Lesson" (1991) consists of a painstakingly illustrated botany lesson on a chalkboard. "Double Negative" (2001) completes the irony in the form of a quote from Shakespeare's Richard II, which begins "Yield stinging nettles to mine enemies," and continues with further hostile misuse of flora and fauna.

Guest curator Paul Forte, a Wakefield conceptual artist, observes in his posted statement: "In my view, there is something inherently natural about the unfolding of human culture, in particular as it relates to the making of art." He has assembled work of a half-dozen artists to whom that perspective is second nature, gathering them from California to College Hill. (Flood teaches at RISD and Mishak at Brown.) As the art show's title suggests, both interior and exterior life are shared terrain. And as this collection demonstrates, fertile imaginations can be every bit as fecund as Mother Nature.

If further evidence is needed, there will be a gallery talk by the artists on April 22 at 2 p.m. at the Wakefield gallery.

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