Artists invoke passage, mystery in show at Oxbow Gallery
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Lydia Kann Nettler's trees speak ("Oh, so predictable," says one, "the weather of mothers"). Phil Lawrence's tubes go about their business (moving water and saving lives). B.Z. Reily's into leather (and yes, baseball's been very, very good to her).
Their triple play inside the intimate Oxbow Gallery in Northampton, on view through Jan. 29, finds three Valley artists inventing new lives for commonplace objects and writing their own stories into them.
Nettler and Lawrence split the front of the gallery on a diagonal in a show called "Sonotubes: The Line Between the Repulsive and the Sublime." Her side is a mini-glade of white and black, column-shaped trees made of cardboard and two floor-to-ceiling scrolls. Nettler fetches up a dark and introspective mood. The trees are comically cylindrical, as if suggesting there are days when nature - that marvel of invention - just mails it in. The Northampton artist, who is also a therapist and author who writes under the name of Lydia Kann, works here in a mixed media that includes words as well as cardboard and papier-mâché.
Words are big for Nettler, for they allow her to tease out psychological as well as physical shapes in her installations. Human beings like to carve their initials into trees, feeling they can somehow live forever.
It is akin to writing anywhere, for here is potential pulpwood, a could-be human convenience like wool still on the sheep. But that doesn't stop Nettler from attaching fragmentary narratives that meander about.
Her circles of words provide human dates - and cloudy emotional weather - on each tree's surface, just as rings inside a tree memorialize passing years. Some passages have the author of these words sounding, well, like such a birch. "For all I know, mom never eats," one passage says, "she survives on venom."
The little scripts can only be taken out of order, like snatches of overheard conversations. They lend incident without context and breed mystery.
Nettler's long scrolls, which move slightly when the front door swings open, are richly worked with charcoal. If you think of a scroll as a place to showcase a message, that communique arrives here in black and shades of gray. Markings on the scrolls could be mistaken for an unknown natural process that's left its imprint and brooks no argument. It says something, perhaps, about endurance and about blunt expression overwhelming our ability to understand.
"It's about mysteries and stories," the artist said the other day.
One side of a scroll, without offering recognizable shapes, draws the eye into a dark, unsettled place. Nettler says she's experimenting with banners like this, drawing inspiration from contemporary Chinese painting. She plans a show of scrolls at Brandeis University in the fall.
The bit players in her installation, little tubes resembling birch branches, lean against a wall. They conjure up the collapse and decay that's always part of every forest's - and society's - narrative.
Piping up
Lawrence's side of the front space looks deceptively utilitarian. Though an accomplished painter, the Northampton artist's material in this show is surgical tubing, air hose, plastic and fabric hoses.
Many are affixed to the gallery wall in bundled packages, tidy as a sailor's ropes, with others looped into designs that blur the line between function and the obvious fun Lawrence is having with this exploration.
One massive fire hose is stowed against the wall as if mounted for duty in the closet of a high-rise building, waiting to serve in the case of an emergency. How then does art serve? And while these pipes carry water, or medicines, what does a creation like this convey?
Lawrence resists interpretation, but is drawn to the idea of the commodities these things represent and the tension between that simple fact and what it is a work of art puts into the marketplace.
"No representation is involved," he writes in a statement about the show, "or overt meaning intended."
It may not be intended, but it's there. The materials vibrate with their "stuffness." The texture of the canvas fire hose. The heft of a metal connector. The orneriness of an old, green-stained garden hose, intent on its unmanageable sprawl.
Given how dutifully Lawrence simulates a real attachment to the wall, there is a mock seriousness. You can believe some reservoir on the other side is about to let fly its contents.
There is order as well. One section of hose hangs from its mount in the shape of a pear, with an interior loop that looks like a giant olive. In one piece, Lawrence gathers old garden hose into folds like ribbon candy that's been dragged through dirt.
Then there is the willful, maybe desperate, civilizing of the plastic cable ties that bind these pipes. And consider the hopefulness of the surgical tubing, which came to Lawrence from an art student at Holyoke Community College, who got it from a relative suffering from emphysema.
However he arranges them, the tubes, pipes and hoses are little 3-D lines, and that's familiar ground for an illustrator. Lawrence draws these objects into a playful storybook of material miscellany.
Skins have it
In the gallery's back exhibit space, Reily, who works in found objects, presents examples from a productive few years with an everyday object that can come saturated with blood, sweat and tears.
Reily, who lives in Shutesbury and teaches art part time to children, has been collecting, dismantling and assembling pieces of old baseball gloves into works that play with all these human touches.
"I love the culture of baseball in our society," she said in an interview at the gallery. "It's such a slow game and doesn't fit our high-speed age."
In 2001, she entered a sculpture using baseball gloves in the "Show Us Your Bra" contest sponsored by the Northampton-based Breast Form Fund, and took first place for "Sports Bra - Field of Dreams." That led later, at an artists' retreat, into deeper work with old mitts.
The Oxbow show presents one of her finest pieces, "Crazy Catch Quilt," created in 2009 from old ball gloves. Reily connects the fragments by lacing them together through the holes that once held pieces of individual gloves together.
The gloves naturally invoke human hands. In this piece they reach out and connect, but are collectively bound inside a wooden square that resembles a device fashioned by a primitive culture to dry a slaughtered animal's skin. From the fun of baseball to someone's defeated prey - what a trip.
Because these skins were once part of a living creature, and then lived second lives in the hands of ballplayers young, old and in-between, there is something haunted in them.
In later work Reily used pieces of gloves to create figurines inspired by Indonesian shadow puppets. And she says that just as her time re-purposing ball gloves might have been playing out, she experimented with running pieces of them through a press at Liz Chalfin's Zea Mays Printmaking studio in Florence, some inked and some plain, to create what are known as ghost prints.
In this month's show, Reily is also exhibiting pieces from what she terms her "good bacteria" series, a project that uses a variety of materials, including wood, to fashion a representation of a microscopic being traveling the bloodstream. Little bunches of brushes grouped around the outside edge are there to provide cellular locomotion. Reily was inspired to explore that world by a sibling's struggle with cancer.
Her next found-object target? She expects to move on from baseball gloves, though it's been suggested to her the market for the work is wide open, given the attachment so many have to the game, the culture and, clearly, the nostalgia. She is wary of becoming trapped in this pursuit.
Meanwhile, friends routinely bring cast-off objects to Reily's studio. She no longer has to go scavenging for materials. "They come to me now."
Larry Parnass, the Gazette's editor, can be reached at editor@gazettenet.com.
The Oxbow Gallery is located at 272 Pleasant St., Northampton. It is open Thursdays through Sundays from noon to 5 p.m.
