Lush Light The focus is on Fabric at the Bell Gallery BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	New patterns A year ago, Bell Gallery curator Vesela Sretenovic noticed that many artists doing interesting work were employing fabrics, sometimes as their sole medium. She and gallery director Jo-Ann Conklin were on the lookout for their annual regional artists show, so "The Fabric of Light" gradually came to be, with its emphasis on non-traditional material. "I was interested in a more simple concept — that is, how fabric is transformed into various cultural or painterly materials," said the curator. "Fabric is often associated with fashion — how can we re-contextualize it so that the fabric becomes a cultural or painterly material, losing its functional side?" The title of the show was decided on last-minute, a collective description of the works chosen rather than a category she was selecting pieces to fit into. Sretenovic consulted with the four artists, who made these works expressly for the show. The emphasis on light emerged organically. "All of them create a certain atmosphere or a little dance," she said of the works, "create some forms that are about light or that reflect light or absorb light or have this playfulness." Differing from the other five pieces in the gallery, Nina Cinelli’s Coming Home does something appropriate for the light-flooded lobby space it occupies. "That is a shadow, and it’s more conceptual light then physical light," Sretenovic noted. "How do we have shadow without light? And the lobby is full of light." Artists usually appreciate being able to custom-tailor work for the long, high white box that is the David Winton Bell Gallery. Sretenovic herself prefers to take on the challenge of that approach. "What I was trying to do was — because everything was produced for the show — to go from one person to the next, to say, ‘OK, she’s doing this and she’s doing this, let’s see, how is this going to look in the space?’ And to just orchestrate, like having a choir. Which piece is going to look best with this?" The untitled curtain-like work by Cynthia Treen did not even take its final, graceful shape until it was hung in the gallery. In one case, the subdued gallery lighting appropriate for the whole space diminished an effect one of the works originally had. Sretenovic motioned to the slight flickers of light on the wall next to Esther Solondz’s River Box and its rippling water. The reflected light was dramatically stronger in the sunlight of the artist’s studio, she remarked. "It was important how we lit the show — conceptually as well, because light is part of the pieces, for this show particularly," the curator said. "To emphasize or accentuate a piece individually, but also to make sure that besides being individual works there is a fluid something about them, that they create this whole." The four artists are all from the Providence area. Cynthia Treen studied design, fashion, and architecture at RISD and has worked with custom furniture designers, architects, and fashion designers. Cristin Searles has her undergraduate degree from Hamilton College and an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Art in New York City. Nina Cinelli went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has an M.F.A. from UMass/Dartmouth. She recently has had work in group exhibitions in New York, Massachusetts, and Chicago, as well as Providence. Esther Solondz’s B.A. at Clark University was in philosophy, and she went on to get an M.F.A. in photography from RISD. Her work is in the collections of the Fogg Art Museum, the DeCordova Museum, and the RISD Museum. — Bill Rodriguez

There are many reasons that fabrics have long gotten short shrift as the stuff of art — by viewers, collectors, and artists themselves. Such material is easily dismissed as decorative and utilitarian, better fit for apparel and upholstery, at best employed in fashion design.

"The Fabric of Light," at Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery, visually discusses that oversight. Six elegantly simple works by four artists explore different ways in which fabrics can accomplish effects — and affects — that materials less translucent and supple cannot.

Entering the List Art Center, you encounter an entertaining sight. Coming Home, by Nina Cinelli, stretches like a shadow across a sectioned-off area of lobby floor. It is, in fact, an attenuated "shadow" more than eight feet long, composed of quilt-like cotton, silk, and denim rectangles, like a harlequin costume in green, purple, and browns. If the joy of homecoming could take physical form, it might look something like this.

Contrasting with the light-flooded lobby of floor-to-ceiling glass, the adjoining Bell Gallery is dimly lit, each of the five works there separately, softly spotlighted.

The work that perhaps speaks most directly to the title of the show, Cristin Searles’s "lure" (2003), was chosen for the invitation card. Think of the way that fishing lures spin and catch the light. Searles has placed scores of colorful, filmy organza ovals on shimmering sheets of transparent squares of the material. Smaller golden ovals are affixed to the larger ones with short whiskers of green threads, tied off with tiny glass beads. The four-foot-wide piece hangs loosely from its upper corners, and many of the overlapping shapes curl naturally, all of which cues an impression of movement, even when no passing viewer is disturbing the air in front of it.

Searles contributes half the show, with two more works composed of organza and glass beads. In a far corner, romance (2004) is humorous as well as visually alluring. Placed on two walls, for visual stereo effect, the installation consists of more than 50 sheer gold color cones of various sizes, each sporting a flat coral disk, eyeing us nipple-like. Her souffle (2004) is composed of scores of airy fabric puffs, white and peach, attached to the wall with pearl-headed straight pins. The assemblage looks like it was spilled from enough height to scatter the frothy pieces.

Movement is expressly an element of Esther Solondz’s River Box (2004), part of an installation titled Until Everything Not Essential Was Washed Away. Other sections of the complete installation, not on view here, combine fabrics with such organic materials as salt and soap flakes. Here a section of stream is simulated, so that lengths of cotton gauze undulate in water flowing over rocks. Lights glow beneath the half-dozen pieces of material. Cloth is so much associated with human use, particularly for draping bodies, that there is a tactile dimension to this work — even if the billowing gown of the drowning Ophelia doesn’t come to mind. River Box, as gentle an offering as it is, acquires considerable visual impact by containing the only activity and sound in the otherwise still gallery.

As the Solondz piece attracts our attention with movement, an untitled work by Cynthia Treen does so through size. Suspended from a ceiling perhaps 15 feet high, on thin cords, is an immobile but sinuous white curtain. A honeycomb of material the width of crepe paper streamers forms a graceful shape that curves back on itself, leaving an opening for a viewer to enter. At the bottom, the material spreads outward on the floor, like a coronation robe.

This is as simple a show as it is visually lush. There is a sculptural quality to all of the works in the gallery, since the play of light upon surfaces lends variety each time we view them from a slightly different perspective. This is also an exploration of the many ways that light plays with woven materials — glistening, suffusing, and so on. As an assemblage of works, "The Fabric of Light" imparts a serene ambiance, an effect not as readily available when sturdier materials are employed.

"The Fabric of Light"

At the David Winton Bell Gallery, 64 College Street in Providence, through July 11.