10th Anniversary—Mary Frank, Pat Lasch, Winifred LutzThe Marilyn Pearl Gallery starts off its second decade with a celebration—a 10th Anniversary show of surprises that's typical of the gallery's atypical and always refreshing taste. This current show—of sculpture by Mary Frank, Pat Lasch and Winifred Lutz—is the sort of gift we've come to expect from this gallery that, typically, doesn't look back to its past achievements but culminates a decade's existence by stepping into some new territory. Of the three artists presented, Pat Lasch's pieces are the most fantastic (in the realm sense of hte word). Each work is a scenario layered in dream fabric. They're on-switches for the imagination. The configurations stand frozen in their moment, making delicacy firm. In Roman Resurrection, 1983, a cracked egg is entombed in a series of mesh cages suspended from a scaffolding of thorned twigs. A tiny, stuffed bird looks in as a blooming, tropical-like flower neutralizes the barren grotesqueness. What's hatching is not ordinary. These creations are forged from dreams spotted with a touch of fever. Though there's death imagery—actual bird skeletons, decayed carcass forms, coffins, thorns, even the actual tiny bird—the pieces don't spook as much as they celebrate by instigating a merry delirium that penetrates to deep memories and a thousand evocations. Mary Frank's pieces suggest the fossils discovered embedded in rock. Her earthenware and stoneware fossils are, however, a few steps from the primordial. Fish, an odd reptile, and human forms (one with wings) are emergent from these stone and clay prisons. Skipping a few million years of evolution, these organic forms rise right from the inanimate, pulling away with their breath from the confines of an inorganic past. The roughened and rouged surfaces bespeak the dead past of archaeology while the sculpted images, some painted with greens, red and light purples, affirm life. Winifred Lutz's pieces play with the starkest interaction between the natural and the geometric. Using hemp papers, she fashions shapes that imitate rocks and floats them on or from a branch, a sculpted wood base, and a string involved with an arc skeleton. If it were merely a joke or a trick, this being fooled into seeing rocks seeming to float, imbued iwth a delicate airiness that can balance them so high in the air, the pieces wouldn't deserve more than a quick regard. But there's a majestral beauty in these balancings and the pieces earn our attention. They mock gravity not our sense of propriety. They command silence and attendant contemplation of a stripped-down interaciton between the organic and inorganic (with some decorative manipulation of the organic elements). The show is hung to the advantage of all the pieces. While we sense a sharing of concerns and proclivities among the works and feel the room as a shared environment, the strong personalities of each piece shine with their own auras. (Arts, December 1986) |