The hour of lead David Cole, Stacy Quakenbush, and more at Judi Rotenberg BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"Director’s Pick: Group Show" Judi Rotenberg Gallery | 130 Newbury Street, Boston | Through August 31

I first learned of Dave Cole’s work years ago when a friend insisted I visit his Web site. I don’t like to "see" an artist’s work on screen. Not only is it like getting a kiss through terrycloth, but it sets up misleading expectations. I did anyway, and it was a memorable event. At the time, Cole was knitting a scarf — for his house. He’d rigged heavy machinery to two telephone polls that served as knitting needles ("Drop a stitch and lose your life," I recall from his Web page), and his approach was as deadpan as if he were sitting in a rocking chair with a wad of yarn in his lap. Not long after, Cole, who hails from Providence, contributed to the DeCordova Museum’s annual showcase of New England artists a Godzilla-sized one-ton teddy bear made of pink fiberglass.

Cole continues in that spirit with two more diminutive but no less iconoclastic pieces in the current group show at the Judi Rotenberg Gallery. This time, the teddy bear’s no bigger than a Cuisinart, but he’s made of woven strands of lead whose braids resemble dark linguini. Although the arms and legs bend slightly, it’s still a hefty creature; holding it reminds you how diamonds are formed. Cole’s other three-dimensional work first looks like a scrappy American flag but on inspection turns out to have been fashioned from battalions of plastic toy soldiers. Some take aim, others engage in hand-to-hand combat, still others melt into their fellow combatants, all under a gaudy overlay of red, white, and blue paint. Toy store meets Hieronymus Bosch. Cole is to his installations and sculpture what Lenny Bruce was to the stage.

From a distance, Stacy Quakenbush’s Beauty Marks suggests a desiccated riverbed. An irregular pattern of five raised vertical lines courses from the top to the bottom of her 49x39 frame like the veiny traces where water once coursed. In fact, Quakenbush’s material is a sheet of industrial-grade lead that she applied to the surface of a paved street. By gently hammering the supple metal onto the macadam, she’s created an impression of the designed and random ground — in the channels between the vertical lines you can make out occasional patterns of geometric forms where she appears to have hit on a grate or a manhole cover. A couple of striations on the surface of the lead have begun to oxidize, and that makes for a delicate patina of burnt orange; the faint color combines with the fan-like vertical lines to suggest a dying leaf. Beauty Marks is both delicate and rough, found and deliberate, ancient and new, an engrossing, understated celebration of the contradictory.

The somber grays and bullet-riddled topography of Stephen Sheffield’s three black-and-white Rain Triptych photos also suggest lead, but there’s no mistaking his subject matter, a narrow view of a lake or pond as rain inflects its surface. The frames may be small (12x16) and their content commonplace, but the artist creates a spiritual overcast, in part through the small band within each image where the falling rain is allowed to come into focus. The foregrounds are hazy and relatively dark, the backgrounds limitless gray sky. Sandwiched between is a sliver of tumultuous, molten clarity where the water erupts and ripples. In the poem that begins, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes," Emily Dickinson writes, "This is the Hour of Lead — /Remembered, if outlived,/As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow — /First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go — ." Sheffield’s masterful eye would have us witness those stages.

You’d think that for its dark, cavernous emptiness — a trainless tunnel somewhere in the Boston subway system — Sean Keenan’s black-and-white Tunnel #1 photo would pack the despair of Sheffield’s water marks, but it does no such thing. Beginning with the size of the picture, 40x40, Tunnel #1 announces itself not in a wistful whisper but in a gleeful shout. In this overexposed image, which was taken without a flash and is unmanipulated, lights grace the tunnel’s walls like lanterns. Sinewy tracks curve up from the foreground left and right; they wrap around a single support column in the middle of the picture, and the area that includes the top half of the column along with the arched ceiling to either side is the one place where the image sharpens. The obscurity and the compositional elements of the dark foreground lead your eye to a lofty place where the pressure of gravity at the juncture of column and ceiling poses no threat. Instead, that area corresponds with the level of the most distant lights, which cast a heart-shaped pattern of shadows. It’s a stolen glimpse at secret urban beauty.

Jacob Kulin’s Linear Movement is a wall-mounted triptych of rectangular glass plates affixed vertically to three strips of polished zebra wood. Kulin varies the angle at which some of the aquamarine plates fit into the wood (with their rounded edges and uniform 18-inch length, they look like bathroom shelves), giving the piece a self-conscious playfulness.

Playfulness gets a little edgier with Donna Rosenthal’s grid of nine 12-inch dresses made out of vintage Wonder Woman comic books and suspended like plants from curved hangers. With their pleated bodices and crenellated skirts, the dresses themselves are meticulously made — I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d worked from a miniature dress form. Across their fronts, however, Rosenthal has printed the first names of women who have inspired her — Golda, Indira, and Gloria (Meir, Gandhi, and Steinem, I presume) — and that works against the pieces’ impact.

George Rosa’s mixed-media work centers on a cartoonish black face with sorrowful, misshapen eyes and a mouth where its jaw ought to be. Bar codes, fragments of words, and a recurring stenciled number (5003) form the backdrop to the visage, along with a newspaper clipping that refers to Iraq in its headline and the figure of a soldier in a gas mask who appears to be spraying mace. All the imagery and the color is packed into the upper half of the frame; the lower half is a flat wash of gray into which elements from above appear to be melting. Turmoil and confusion, violence and rupture — in short, the stuff of war — ride over this emptiness.

Rounding out the show are two expressionistic and colorful oil paintings by LaVaughn Jenkins, an abstract cityscape in oranges and greens by Anthony Falcetta, a delicate mixed-media rose in silhouette by Anne Beresford, a video installation by Mary Ellen Strom, abstract paintings by Jennifer Amadeo-Holl, Anne Gilley, and John Provenzano, a delightful oil-and-mixed-media piece by Patricia Jo Peacock, and two seascapes by David Kupferman.