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ART REVIEW: His Space is the Place - Nathan Hayden creates art of multiple dimensions with his forest-like installation at the Jane Deering Gallery By Josef Woodard, News-Press Correspondent May 17, 2013 11:32 AM Nathan Hayden, 'go innocent into the forest my children' Elements of surprise and contrast have been amply in the house at the Jane Deering Gallery, especially this season. THe gallery, which is run by the mostly Massachusetts-based gallerist Deering in Santa Barbara for the first several months of each year, has, in 2013, presented the vari-dimensional art of Joan Tanner, the dynamic duo Keith Puccinelli and Dane Goodman, and, last month, the entrancingly delicate -- and labyrinthine -- drawings of Linda Ekstrom. For something completely different, the gallery’s current artist-in-focus is the creative lateral thinker Nathan Hayden, whose aptly and tangle named installation ‘go innocent into the forest my children’ effectively transforms the gallery space into a strange, splendiferous wonderland. With its handing garden of jellyfish-like sculptures and ritualistic drawing gestures on the walls, growing from minute to epic, the artist has effectively owned this space for a month, creating a surreal yet palpable sense of place and mystery within these four walls. Mr. Hayden was born in rural West Virginia and earned his MFA at UCSB in 2009. He since has shown at Contemporary Arts Forum and elsewhere in town, and art beyond town. He has some invitingly peculiar ideas about what makes art, and where and how it can be pushed. In his current ‘forest’ exhibition, the yarn-and-wire amoebas afloat at eye level in the room and the artfully faux hieroglyphics ‘de-faced’ walls conspire toward some non-linear but somehow connected language of inquiries, into nature and ancient culture, joined at the contemporary art statement before us. To get to some kind of kernel of truth and/or inspiration in the artist’s process, move past the larger gestures o the installation to the display as where we find small ‘cards,’ marked up with drawing minutiae and fleeting bursts of text. From those tiny, detailed expressions in a pocket-sized format, we follow the trail of artistic evidence to a patch of very small, festering area of drawing on the back wall. That becomes the source for ever larger primitive iconography eventually consuming the back and side wall, making the evolutionary move from micro to uber-macro. Generally, ‘go innocent into the forest my children’ is a site-specific, site-altering project, pulling us into its own self-defining ‘otherworldly’ realm, even as the traffic -- foot and vehicular -- whizzes by on Canon Perdido, just outside the gallery door. He follows intuitive and illogical creative impulses, inspired by the physicality of dancing and the intellectual buzz of stray ideas and mental linkages. In his new piece/space, he writes that he was pursuing ideas ‘that amplifies what I refer to as the subtle psychedelia of everyday existence.’ Of course, one persons’ everyday existence is another’s magical thinking moment. Finding a way to integrate the two is the ultimate trick , and a beguiling unsolvable problem, but Mr. Hayden has a thing or two to say and ideas to offer on that magical-meets-everyday account. ART REVIEW ________________________________________________________________________ NATHAN HAYDEN | go innocent into the forest my children When: Through May 30 . 2013 Where: Jane Deering Gallery . 128 E. Canon Perdido Street Hours: 11am to 5pm Tuesday-Saturday, til 6pm on Thursday . Sunday 1-4pm Information: janedeeringgallery.com . 805-966-3334 ART REVIEW: Leading Nowhere to Somewhere - Linda Ekstrom projects her unique drawing sensibility on the theme of various labyrinths, now at the Jane Deering Gallery By Josef Woodard, News-Press Correspondent April 19, 2013 12:14 PM Getting an easy handle on the art and artistic thinking of Linda Ekstrom can be difficult business, to her credit, but the riddling aspects of her work tend to be more logical, focused and concept-driven than first impressions might suggest. So it goes with her deceptively subtle and mild-mannered new exhibition at the Jane Deering Gallery, ‘labyrinth.’ Her exquisite but never smug series of drawings based on labyrinths, with a few sculptural deviations in the gallery, speak softly but carry some big ideas. The show is tellingly divided between sources from Christian antiquity, garden labyrinths and manuscript examples as sources from which to vary and recontextualize the contemplative puzzles at hand, mazes through which, as she says in her statement ‘one may feel lost, but one is never lost.’ Ms. Ekstrom’s artistic ways and means include book art -- questioning, deconstructing and reshaping our impression of books -- and drawings, with an angle or two, and sculptures behaving like something else. In group show appearances in town over the last few years, including ‘Achromatic Variations’ at Deering, ‘Density’ at the Atkinson Gallery and in last year’s faculty show ‘WORK’ at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies, she has tended to appear like the quiet one in the corner with sly ideas rising up out of an introspective place rather than showy verve. This body of work, she explains, grew out of her interest in land art, perhaps the most famous example of which is circular vertigo and visceral energy of Robert Smithsons ‘Spiral Jetty.’ Of course, Ms. Ekstrom goes in the opposite expressive direction from the splashy ‘Jetty,’ with its knotty fragile realm of small, hermetic-yet-airy drawings. Ghostly echoes of gray lines play off the more vividly colored lines, like out-of-sync and slightly dissonant harmonies. Color-coding and other visual distinctions enters into her programming of the different series, from the red and graphite patterns in the ‘Church labyrinth’ series, in patterns which yearn to be resolved but never quite are. Green and gray forms percolate in the ‘Turf labyrinth’ series, with more rounded and even turf-like patterns, while blue squiggles and visually electric energies mark the ‘Manuscript labyrinths’ series of drawings. On the back wall, things get physical and three-dimensional with her silver-painted mesh pieces in the droopy synthetic material of handcut tyvek, a three-part series called ‘garden: outside the labyrinth.’ Here, the geometry of the enmeshed lines and patterns is neater and cleaner, ostensibly, except that -- and it’a big ‘except that’ -- the pieces naturally sag, bunch and furl through the manner of their hanging on a single nail. In another case of the artist’s clever rerouting of perceptions in the gallery, her art book pieces ‘Ariadne’s Love I, II and III’ have ben decoratively adorned and repressed with silver thread. As such, Ms. Ekstrom bounds and ‘draws on’ books-as-objects, effectively sewn shut and altered from their operable, readable function. Art with its re-inventive nature meets the conventionally neutral physicality of books, and the first medium entangles with the other. In a similar way, the artist bases each ‘labyrinth’ drawing on a specific, actual example in the known historical world, but runs the original through her deconstructionist-oriented personal filter. Rebel impulses aside, she nonetheless kills us softly and leaves no psychic bruises. ART REVIEW ________________________________________________________________________ LINDA EKSTROM | labyrinth When: Through April 28th . 2013 Where: Jane Deering Gallery . 128 E. Canon Perdido Street Hours: 11am to 5pm Tuesday through Saturday . Sunday 1-4pm Information: janedeeringgallery.com _____________________________________________________________________ Labyrinths New Spring Show at Jane Deering Gallery Wednesday, April 17, 2013 EKSTROM UNBOUND: Artist and UCSB College of Creative Studies professor Linda Ekstrom is perhaps best known for what she has done to the Bible. Her sculptural creations based on the shredding and reconstituting of actual Bibles into hard spheres, soft pillows, and other suggestive shapes, however, are only one small part of Ekstrom’s broad-ranging practice in relation to religion and to the idea of the book. Linda Ekstrom’s “labyrinth: church: 17” is based on a drawing of a labyrinth that once existed at the Reims Cathedral but was destroyed in 1778. In Labyrinth, her current show running through April 28 at Jane Deering Gallery, Ekstrom heads in a new direction, albeit one that originates in the pages of a different sort of book — one cataloguing the world’s most intriguing and extensive outdoor physical labyrinths. Over the last few years, Ekstrom has been opening this special volume (borrowed from UCSB’s Davidson Library on a series of long-term faculty loans) and using it as a kind of automatic stimulus for her drawing practice. With her left, non-drawing hand, Ekstrom traces the contours of one of the plates in her labyrinths book. With her right, drawing hand, Ekstrom mimics the pattern twice, once on the way in, with a pen, in ink, and then again on the way out, with a pencil, in graphite. It’s a fanciful yet concrete way of making these distant spaces into physical realities in the present. By moving through the labyrinth of Ekstrom’s body, from one hand to the other, sacred networks of passage and occlusion that exist in real space elsewhere become phantoms circulating in the labyrinth of the human nervous system. The results are mesmerizing double images that suggest both architectural and mental space. Does the right hand ever really know what the left hand is doing? Get to Labyrinth and decide for yourself. __________________________________________________________________________________ Puccinelli and Goodman In The Trace Prints Project, Keith Puccinelli and Dane Goodman Draw Together Tuesday, March 5, 2013 by CHARLES DONELAN A COUPLE OF NOBODIES: In their new show at Jane Deering Gallery, well-known and prolific Santa Barbara artists Dane Goodman and Keith Puccinelli converge over a dizzying process known as trace printing. A piece of drawing paper is placed onto an inked linoleum block, and the artist then draws on the dry reverse surface of the paper with some kind of stylus. When the first proof is peeled away, a simple print is created, showing a mirror image of whatever has been drawn on the reverse side. In subsequent proofs, the original image comes up as a negative from where the ink has been taken away. At each go, the paper picks up more static and atmosphere from dust, air bubbles, and distortion. The trace printing technique was used to great effect by Marie Schoeff in her January 2012 show Traces, also at Deering, but in this instance, with two artists involved, the drama inherent in the sequencing and multiplicity of the images takes on an added dimension of dialogue.
And what a dialogue it is. It’s an existential circus in these 110 prints, populated by Puccinelli’s now familiar clowns and Goodman’s surrogate, the snowman, along with a broad cast of goofy nobodies, including a guy pushing a lawn mower, a peanut head smoking a pipe, a snake, a buffalo, and one cracked-out crocodile, as well as Abe Lincoln. As the most important recurring figures, snowman and clown go through all kinds of trials and tribulations. In one plate, the melting head of snowman dangles precipitously over a candle while clown, likewise decapitated and dangling, does his best to blow it out. Apparently, clown has snowman’s back, at least on this one. At other times, as when smiling snowman surfs the prone dead body of clown, the message is more ambivalent. As in the previous work of both artists, not far beneath a playful surface lies a darkly mystical engagement with threshold states — not only the limits of consciousness and the limits of recognition but also the limits of life. The charming small catalog created to accompany the show, which includes a great essay by David Pagel, is called “eating fresh peaches and tomatoes talking about death drawing together,” which I take to be an entirely straightforward and literal description of the way this work was created. If clown is man as, well, clown, then snowman is perhaps understandable as a Duchampian pun on “snowman = ’s no man,” as in “it’s no man.” In this as in so many things, Wallace Stevens has the appropriate last words, and they appear in the last stanza of his poem “The Snow Man.” For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds Dane Goodman/Keith Puccinelli: The Trace Prints Project will be at the Jane Deering Gallery through Saturday, March 30.
___________________________________________________ ART REVIEW: Celebrating In-Between States - The fascinating and hard-to-categorize Santa Barbara-based Joan Tanner is the subject of the current show at Jane Deering Gallery By Josef Woodard, News-Press Correspondent February 15, 2013 6:24 AM ART REVIEW Joan Tanner | in direct dialogue When: through March 2 Where: Jane Deering Gallery, 128 E. Canon Perdido St. Gallery hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat., 1-4 p.m. Sun. Information: 966-3334, janedeeringgallery.com Certainly, one of the more intriguing and more resistant- to-easy-reading artists based in Santa Barbara over the past few decades has been Joan Tanner, painter, draughtsperson, maverick sculptor, media-morpher, explorer without any simple "-ism" badge to flaunt. Among other impulses, she mixes up aspects of minimalism and conceptualism, and in recent years, a new junk art aesthetic of her own witty devising. We catch wind of her creative energies at varying intervals in these parts. She had a one-person show at Contemporary Arts Forum in 2000 and was involved in the "Blur" show in the Funk Zone, and then presented a dazzling sensorial circus of a show at Otis in Los Angeles, "On Tenderhooks," circa 2006. We've caught glimpses of her art in group shows, from the raggedy magnetism of her piece in the impressive show "Persistence" at Santa Barbara City College's Atkinson Gallery last season to a logical presence in the showing of Santa Barbaran artists from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art permanent collection. What we find in the alluring show at the Jane Deering Gallery with the cagey cool title "in direct dialogue" is a portrait of the artist's art, mostly from an older perspective, juxtaposed with fleeting gusts of more recent artistic field reports. By and large, the exhibition, which is divided up into two separate, rotating sets of work in tandem with public-welcome viewings at Ms. Tanner's own studio, displays the artist's special painting approach, with abstract-meets-and-blurs-realism canvases dating from the '80s, with some newer sprinklings for good measure. Ms. Tanner's painting aesthetic from that period assertively played on the dichotomy and interaction of abstraction and its supposed opposite, the things we know and love and, if not understand, then recognize. We are drawn into a quandary or a riddle of reading her paintings, finding the anchoring bits of ready comprehension and, simultaneously, relishing the mysteries afoot. Most imposingly, the large painting "Blue Blood," on the gallery's back wall, asserts its ambiguous narrative with swirls and eddies of flowing brushwork, surrounding a central "theme" and/or object in the center, something akin to a bird of paradise blossom with flaming orange as the primary color event in the painting. In the painting "Discs Facing Off," an almost cleanly symmetrical (key word, "almost") pair of forms creates a rough visual mirroring and magnetic field effect. Perhaps the strongest piece in the room is "Indirect Dialogue," whose title is, tellingly, a subtle and word- playful variation on the grammatical math of the show's title, "in direct dialogue." It could be said that the dialogue in question concerns the curious relationship of two ambiguous objects and two patterns afloat in the bubbling black void of a background. The "events" in the void both define and mystify the pictorial space. With a lighter palette and spirit, "La Muerte de La Mesa," from 1988, presents a collusion of biomorphic forms, suggesting impressions as varied as a womb-like space and a Southwestern landscape turned asunder. Zooming up to a more present tense in the Tanner aesthetic evolution, her 2011 piece with the loopy cool title "Concreto" typifies her more recent sculptural, installation-geared conceptual concerns, in which materials from the dumpster and the salvage yard of the modern world are repurposed in her own special fine art terms. One of the newest pieces at the Deering Gallery, from this year of our Lord, is the coyly spare "Not a Cross." The oil stick on stonehenge paper drawing posits its simple visual tactic — fuzzy brown foliage draped on a form more like a plus sign than a "t" — but leans into the conceptual back story and perceptual taunt of its title. With a Magritte-ish wink, she colors the piece with a title flicking off our natural westerner art appreciators' instinct to read the form as a crucifix, or extension thereof. It's a rugged image, but not an old rugged cross, thank you very much. Leave it to Ms. Tanner to stir up ideas and artistic juices with her work, an ever-evolving body of works and ideas in flux, as slippery and vital in the '10s as it was in the '80s. www.newspress.com/Top/Article/article.jsp?Section=SCENE&ID=566652898935701593 ____________________________________________________ Liquid light by Cate McQuaid GLOBE CORRESPONDENT GALLERIES ___________ Chris Baker works intimately with form, color, and the materiality of his medium. But the Maine artist, who has a show at Jane Deering Gallery in Gloucester, strives to eliminate the appearance of brushstrokes. He lays his paintings out in one or two formats, grid or columnar, paints sections with a brush, and then drags a trowel or palette knife over the still-wet paint. The images remain, depicting the living room of his house, a chandelier at Hagia Sophia (an Istanbul museum), a Paris patisserie. But the smears and stutters of paint make the scenes hallucinatory. Large Interior has liquid light pouring into a room through several doors and spilling onto the wood floor in gleaming reflections. The sections are vertical, with paint pulled horizontally across them. Areas to the left and right of a central table dissolve to shimmers as the paint moves, but the table itself is mostly clean lines and planes. The contrast between that solid form and the sense that all else is melting into light around it is seductive and alarming. For Picnic, Baker applies the technique to a beach scene, with several picnickers gathered around a large rock. Each figure gets a vertical section; some are more smeared than others, which adds psychological subtext. Color, too, deepens the narrative -- rocks along the water appear in blue, orange, Kelly green, and the sand is mauve peach. Everything feels bright and heightened, but there’s a sense that brilliant as it is, it’s already over. CHRIS BAKER | Interior Views at: Jane Deering Gallery Gloucester through August 26 . 2012 978-281-8051 www.janedeeringgallery.com ______________________________________________________ ART REVIEW: Interior Intimations Gone Big - Maine-based painter Chris Baker shows a calmly dazzling selection of paintings BY JOSEF WOODARD, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT May 11, 2012 12:07 PM ART REVIEW CHRIS BAKER | BIG PICTURES When: through May 29 In the fairly recent but thankfully continuing saga of the Jane Deering Gallery in Santa Barbara, dating back a few years in shifting locales and now settled into an ideal spot in a renewably hip quadrant of Canon Perdido, we have come to rely on a certain level of aesthetic discernment and intrigue. The tradition continues with the current exhibition of calmly fascinating paintings by Chris Baker, who hails from Maine but also maintains a Carpinteria presence. Baker’s new show is both cagily and sometimes truthfully dubbed ‘Big Pictures,’ a fitting title for paintings that sometimes go literally large, but also in assorted ways aspire to a bigger picture than the sum of the apparent parts. Baker does some kind of personalized variation on the dance between realism, abstraction and ‘X-factors’ both known and otherwise involved in the still vital and ever-evolving process of figuring out what painting is all about. Suffice to say, there is a lot going on in this set of paintings based on the interior of his own Maine home and visits to Istanbul. His artistic voice involves his ability to integrate the various qualities of a painter sensitive to the qualities of place, space, objects and interiors, with the innate probing stylistic elasticity of an abstractionist. Long Interior 2012 . Oil on canvas . 55 x 120 inches In the deceptively generic titled Long Interior and Large Interior, large paintings hung across the room from each other, the painter captures the sense of a domestic interior (his own), but also with a character of optical and painterly effects. The compositions are semi-segmented, structured in vertical strips or squared off into sections, and with palette knife swipes across the surface, given a horizontal scraped look. Large Interior 2012 . Oil on canvas . 78 x 92 inches In the end effect, the paintings appear genteel in some way, but also rugged and scruffy, fuzzy-focused in a Gerhard Richter-scaled way. A similar mix of painterly approaches and genuine interest in the subject appears in the painting of a chandelier in the Hagia Sophia and an ornate kiosk in Istanbul, and the artist’s own flair, visually and as a painter, ties implicitly in with a Turkish/Arabic sensibility of design and iridescence. Hagia Sophia 2012 . Oil on canvas . 12 x 16 inches Open Doors 2012 . Oil on canvas . 32 x 45 inches Despite the overall sense of a strong, recurring artistic imprint in this body of work, there are variations on his themes here. The painting Open Doors has an almost-Matisse-like color palette and deftness of gesture, while the smaller in scale but denser in palette Small Interior with Sunlight and Small Interior #1 exert a more compacted, muscular energy which pushes beyond the observational detailing of the larger paintings and courts the muse of abstraction more openly. In his artist’s statement regarding this recent batch of paintings, Baker discusses the scent of -- and sense of -- liberation involved in the process of painting. He concludes that ‘the liberation I seek comes from creating a dynamic visual field that is open (in its reading) and leads the viewer in new directions.’ That objective is handily achieved in this modest but somehow complex and dazzling group of ‘big’ pictures. ART REVIEW ________________________________________________________________________ Alice Hutchins at Jane Deering Gallery Magnet Art from a Fluxus Pioneer Monday, April 16, 2012 FLUX STAR: As the years pass, the “Eureka!” moment experienced by Alice Hutchins while browsing the crowded aisles of Manhattan’s Canal Street junk shops gains in stature. A recent arrival to New York City, Hutchins was a young artist who was already well-versed in the emergent sensibility of radical experimentalism hatching in her former home of Paris. In 1967, just months after coming into contact with George Maciunas and the other John Cage-influenced artists of Fluxus, Hutchins was cruising New York’s junkiest street, looking for small objects with which to create her Dada-influenced jewelry when she happened on a bin of powerful Alnico magnets. On their own, these magnetic alloy rings, chains, ball bearings, and plates made strong visual statements, recalling the industrial-looking sculptural innovations of such artists as David Smith and Anthony Caro. But taken together and assembled in geometric compositions that could be rearranged in a multitude of different ways, these fascinating amalgams of object and force field became at once Hutchins’s aesthetic signature and her conceptual métier. With the power vested in her by magnetic fields, Hutchins exploded the notion that a finished sculpture required submission to a single physical outcome. Whether it’s the nestled links of a tiny chain attached by magnetic force to the face of a woman’s ring, or the magnetism that holds two large steel cylinders in an irregular vertical stack against the background of a large ferrite magnet, Hutchins’s assemblages invite reassembly and reassessment. As Hutchins put it in her central mission statement, “Multiple choice with freedom to change is central to my life.” At Jane Deering Gallery (128 E. Canon Perdido St.) this month (through Apr. 29), 19 of Hutchins’s works are on display in an exhibition called, appropriately enough, magnetic force. In addition to such iconic magnet works as “Group 1 Model K” (1968) and “Stand Up” (2008), the show also offers some examples of Hutchins the abstract painter, like the gorgeous, Rothko-esque “Untitled (orange)” from some time around 1966. Hutchins, who was raised in Chico, California, moved to Santa Barbara in 1991 and lived here until her death in 2009. She’s one of the most important artists to have called Santa Barbara home in this century, and her work commands sustained attention in a way that compares favorably with the best of Fluxus and other conceptual/intermedia work of the 1960s and 1970s. A Flux Box (Circuit Box Series) 5/6 1973 Plated steel, steel knobs, ferrite magnet . 11 5/8”h x 11 5/8”w x 2”d To put this show into the context of the grand Pacific Standard Time initiative that is just now coming to a close in Los Angeles, Hutchins could easily have earned a substantial place in any prehistory of Under the Big Black Sun, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles’ massive survey of experimental California art of the 1970s. Looking at something like Hutchins’s “A Flux Box (Circuit Box Series 5/6)” (1973), one experiences anew the shock that greeted viewers when the “ready-made” methods of Marcel Duchamp began to proliferate contemporary art in the late ’60s and early ’70s. In other words, this is a great show, partly beautiful and partly provocative, filled with the vivid ideas of a woman who did not accept traditional definitions of the relations among artist, object, and audience. ____________________________________________________ ART REVIEW: Artistic Magnetism, Revisited - The late artist Alice Hutchins, a Santa Barbaran during her final years, returns after a memorable 2007 retrospective at Contemporary Arts Forum BY JOSEF WOODARD, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT ART REVIEW ALICE HUTCHINS: magnetic force When: through April 29 One of the most significant examples of a local/global art exhibition angle came late in 2006 when the Contemporary Arts Forum put on a memorable retrospective exhibition of work by Alice Hutchins, the witty and insightful California-born, Paris and NYC-based, and finally Santa Barbara artist. Then 90 years old and still at work on her art, Hutchins showed her delightful magnetized, malleable and moveable little feast-like sculptures, the best-known of her artistic output. Her art, blessed with tinker toy charm and Zen-like, aleatoric philosophy in the trunk, begged viewers to break with formality and ‘touch the art.’ within reason. That was just one of the ways this free-spirited artist expressed a cerebral joie de vivre, and that paradox returns to the Santa Barbara art scene courtesy of a small-but-mighty show of her work this month at the Jane Deering Gallery. Catching another close-up, touch-enabled encounter with Hutchins art, now in the afterglow of her posthumous phase (she passed away in 2009, at the ripe age of 94), immediately summons up the deft, playful power of the Hutchins touch. In her work, the tough stuff of metal and magnets, and intimations of industrial strength and a metal shop’s day’s workings, is counterbalanced by unexpected levity and lightness of being. It makes no sense, and yet all the sense -- in the world according to Alice Hutchins, and subsequently ourselves, her admirers. Deering show, ‘Magnetic Force’ -- like CAF’s ‘Magnetic Encounters’ and critics and admirers everywhere -- can hardly resist the temptation to lay up the inherent and embedded magnetism of Hutchins’ art. Yes, the natural, invisible but potent force of magnetism is the fuel and the bonding agent by which her unusual and playful sculptures are held together and also given the freedom of endless flexibility. And magnetism, of the charismatic kind, makes itself amply known in this art, as well. For the Deering show, the specialness of the occasion is enhanced by a handsomely acquitted brochure, including an essay by L.A.-based critic Peter Frank and comments by Merrily Peebles, curator of the Hutchins collection and the curator behind the CAF show. But in some way, any amount of theorizing or art historical configuring or aligning is only chatter factor compared to the actual, in-house, touchable wiles of the art itself. Hutchins may be a link in the binding chain of twentieth century artistic practice which ranged from the redefinition and ‘found object-ifying’ nature of Marcel Duchamp and his descendants and the rebel high jinx of the 1960s Fluxus movement, of which she was a part (and was a part of the big Fluxus show at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in the 90s). But ultimately, her art is well-appreciated in the fleshy, flinty here-and-now of its physical presence. Even a child could get the depth and beauty of her work. Maybe the proper wording is ‘especially’ a child. Although the meat and potatoes of this exhibition, logically enough, focuses on her metal-magnet sculpture, it also touches on her various two-dimensional efforts, especially from earlier in her artistic development. A certain centering luminosity is present in the exhibition layout, courtesy of two of her flowing, nearly monochromatic paintings -- one yellow, one orange -- on opposite walls in the middle of the gallery. Those paintings provide a visual warm zone amid the stuff of steely gray materials and deceptive machinistic airs. Metal or not, Hutchins’ art manages to mediate the rougher edges with airs of gentle whimsy and mold-busting invention. On the back wall of the gallery is the ironically-entitled ‘Frieze 2,’ which plays on the ancient model of the wall frieze but with the easily changeable assortment of galvanized metal spheres and squares in a meandering dance line across the wall. Fixity is not invited. Variations of shape and surface materials keep each piece distinct, despite the common artistic lingo of her magnetic metal sculptures. ‘Construct A’ consists of galvanized, sheet metal-like ruggedness of its pieces, in contrast to the stacked, shiny polygons of nickel and chrome-plated steel of ‘Hex 2/3.’ ‘Stand Up’ sneaks in primary colors splashes of blue and red, into its miniature circus-like array of shapes, including the comically self-referential shape of chubby u-shaped magnets we know and love. Suspended coyly over the gallery’s desk, with a seeming fragility which doesn’t imply seismic sturdiness, the piece called ‘Cercle Gris’ is a large metal hoop which hosts a series of much smaller and vari-colored hoops, something like a Fluxes-ified variation on the Olympic symbol. In a similar topsy-turvy shape shifter gesture, ‘A Flux Box (Circuit Breaker Series) 5/6’ is a shiny metal box which contains -- but barely -- an ensemble of gleaming metal balls, a couple of which mischievously dangle as if seeking escape from the enclosure, attempting to get literally ‘outside the box.’ By comparison to the open-air, tinker-ready pieces on display, works set behind plexiglass on pedestals have a more fixed art here. In these enclosed pieces, chains, balls, industrial-esque forms are pieced together with the artist’s signature mix of surety and embrace of chance, yet somehow appear more complete and statement-approved in their untouchable presentation. But, of course, that suggestion of classicist art object finish, too, is just an illusion, which Hutchins would slyly appreciate and fess up to. With ‘Magnetic Force,’ that old Hutchins magic comes back to roost for at least a short visit to the public sphere. Needless to say, you have to see it and touch it to believe it, or to get it, in the truest way. ALICE HUTCHINS: magnetic force When: Through April 29 . 2012 Where: Jane Deering Gallery . 128 E. Canon Perdido Street Hours: 11am to 5pm Tuesday-Saturday, til 6pm on Thursday . Sunday 1-4pm Information: janedeeringgallery.com . 805-966-3334 _____________________________________________________Reviews of past exhibitions: ART REVIEW: Musical Gesturing - A professor at UC Davis, painter Gina Werfel creates deceptively delicate abstractions, as seen in her show at Jane Deering Gallery BY JOSEF WOODARD, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT February 17, 2012 12:44 PM Gina Werfel / POLYPHONICS . through March 4, 2012 Upon first impression, the gentle spirits of the work by Gina Werfel, now showing at Jane Deering Gallery, imply a certain floating feeling, an avoidance of grounding. But impressions shift with closer scrutiny, and we recognize that the painter’s immediately apparent delicacy is at least partially deceptive. Muscles are flexing and gears are turning beneath the becalmed surfaces. Werfel, a painter of note and an art professor at UC Davis, also creates paintings from a denser, louder place on the spectrum of dynamics in contemporary abstract art, and has had experience dealing with ‘plein air’ landscape painting. But the lighter, representational-free affairs gathered into an alluring exhibition she calls Polyphonics at Jane Deering have a sense of graceful rightness, comparable to the art of Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler (maybe even a mutant combo thereof). In addition to its self-evident charms, the art plays well and hangs compatibly in the compact but open-feeling space of this new Deering gallery. This show’s title accounts for much in terms of what’s abuzz in the painter’s aesthetic. True to the musical analogy of the exhibition title, polyphonic being the conjoining and intermingling of different and not necessarily ‘compatible’ harmonic structures and colors, Werfel’s visual scheme behaves in a similar way. We get the idea of the musicality of what we’re looking at, also aided by the title, in Symphony, a pastoral invention, at that. The artist also works well in more compact dimensions (chamber music?), with humbly-scaled acrylic pieces, as small as eight-by-six inches. Still, there’s no doubt that the larger oil on canvas paintings are the main event here. Interlude 2008 . oil on canvas . 48”x48” Despite the relative calm demeanor and surface ‘volume’ in the art, there is a fair amount of activity and varied gestural riffing going on. That subtle tension and accordance gives the art some of its character. In Interlude, for example, a particularly pale and milky space, several spare bolder strokes swim and vie for attention. Garland 2012 . oil on canvas . 52”x48” Alas, the thicket thickens with Garland, a more tangled collection of brushstrokes and inklings -- a dizzy, desultory garland -- of colors and gestures. But a surprisingly arid and vaporous zone on the right side of the painting provides a kind of resonating free space to let the whole breathe. Wooded Interior 2012 . mixed media and collage on paper . 22”x30” A sense of emphasis on the importance of void and solid, and the expressive power of composition also comes through in the cleverly named piece Wooded Interior. Another truthful title, so apt as to seemingly look back around to sly and gentle irony, is Light and Airy, befitting a painting suggesting lightness of being, verging on weightlessness. That same title might be applied to the artist’s body of work as a whole. Light and airy, yes, but with secret deposits of depth, retinal energy and a critical exploratory spirit to complicate things in intriguing ways. Light and Airy 2008 . oil on canvas . 40”x36” ____________________________________________________ Abstract and Beautiful Wednesday, February 15, 2012 ABSTRACT AND BEAUTIFUL: Exciting shows of abstract painting hit the walls of Santa Barbara galleries for the month of February ....... Gina Werfel / Polyphonics at Jane Deering Gallery is one. Over at Jane Deering’s space on Canon Perdido Street, Gina Werfel’s colorful, exquisitely skillful improvisations in the manner of Willem de Kooning and Wassily Kandinsky assert that more traditionally gestural forms of abstract painting are very far from dead. Indeed, the biggest canvases in this exhibit — “Interlude” (2008) at 48”x48” and “Garland” (2011) at 52”x48” — are among the most confident and accomplished paintings in any genre currently on view in our city. Werfel teaches art and art history at UC Davis, and she has been at this for several decades, having earned her MFA from Columbia University’s School of Art in 1979. But that said, the idiom she has chosen is about as close to timeless as painting gets, and the command she exercises over color, composition, and negative space ravishes the eye. These images reward sustained viewing in a way that’s nearly cinematic and unfold in myriad directions and on multiple levels for periods of many minutes. Elsewhere in this spare, intelligently hung exhibit, Werfel’s works on paper inflect her painterly compositions with subtle, barely noticeable bits of collage that nevertheless alter the tone significantly. “Glimpse” (2011) and “Symphony” (2011) make a fantastic pair and cry out to be taken home to brighten some lucky person’s domestic interior. As successful as she is at abstraction, Werfel does not content herself with only one idiom, and there are also a few examples of her landscape work on view. She summers in Western Europe and takes advantage of that happy fact to produce some elegant plein air paintings on paper. “Yacht” (2011), “Château La Napoule” (2011), and “View from La Napoule” (2011) all share the exuberant color sense that makes her oeuvre so distinctive and compelling. http://www.independent.com/news/2012/feb/15/abstract-and-beautiful/ _______________________________________________________________________ Marie Schoeff, Traces at Jane Deering Gallery New Show Combines Drawing and Printing in Unusual Ways Wednesday, January 18, 2012 SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT The loose and layered three-dimensional whorls at the heart of Marie Schoeff’s current work repeat a fundamental gesture that seeks to recapture the sensuality and integrity of the human body. Whether they refer to the female figure, to plants, flowers, and fruit, or to the shapely and sensuous mental spaces of intimacy, Schoeff’s marks only suggest specific images, remaining abstract, although they bear witness to the hand of the artist and the vicissitudes of the process and the media. From the evidence of this show, with its seven drypoint prints and dozen “trace drawings,” Schoeff has been very active with the press in the last two years. Many of the pieces on view have complex and vivid histories involving multiple encounters with plexiglass, ink, paper, and pressure. The Trace Drawing series represents Schoeff’s original contribution to the history of the print, as they exist by virtue of a sequence of procedures that, in this combination at least, are wholly the artist’s own and that result in a two-sided art object that resists easy assimilation into known categories of print or drawing. Schoeff draws on the exposed side of a sheet of paper while the inked plexiglass plate sits below her drawing surface, marking the far side of the sheet. Then, when the print is pulled, what’s underneath shows up as a negative of the image on top, as the pressure of the drawing on the surface evacuates lines of white from the print below. There are also all kinds of incidental effects due to the presence of air bubbles and dust. This side of the drawing is the trace, and it provides a ghostly reminder of the double life that any image leads in the age of mechanical reproduction. Courtesy Photo “Coil-Fourth” (2011) is one of Marie Schoeff’s drypoint prints from the show Traces. The results of this immersion in the printing process are uniformly satisfying and deep. Drypoints like “Mommy Long Legs” and the “Coils,” “Second,” and “Third” have the edgy intensity of black-and-white prints and the jazzy immediacy of ink-and-brush drawing. The delicious feathered edges of these sinuous lines are effects achieved at one remove from their source, having begun as the marks left in plexiglass by the passage of Schoeff’s etching tool, which is a hot soldering iron. Only later when the burrs created by this method of making incisions in the plastic are filled with ink do they flow on and into the paper, creating the slight fuzziness that gives these compositions their unique texture and added dimensionality. Schoeff’s mastery of form comes out over and over again in the trace drawings, which are the show’s main attraction. These two-sided works reveal an aesthetic sensibility that’s equally at home with the organic and the mechanical, hatching a seemingly endless proliferation of self-englobed surfaces through the interaction of print, hand, and ink. In the sequence of trace drawings that begins with “Spinner” and goes through “Ghost Spinner,” “Duomo Duo,” and “Duomo Ghost,” Schoeff demonstrates the richness and intricacy of detail that becomes possible when these techniques are deployed in a kind of relay, where one print becomes the basis of the next, and so on. To really appreciate the exquisite balance and authority of these works, you really have to see them in person, where the play of surface and depth evoked by the artist’s draftsmanship becomes as one with the medium. Congratulations to the Jane Deering Gallery for kicking off 2012 with such a rewarding and elegant exhibit. 4•1•1 Marie Schoeff’s Traces runs through January 29 at the Jane Deering Gallery, 128 East Canon Perdido Street. ART REVIEW Ghostly Echoes in Line and Thought - Marie Schoeff's intriguing, subtle exhibition in the new Jane Deering Gallery space deftly channels visual energy forces BY JOSEF WOODARD, SANTA BARBARA NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT . January 13 . 2012 MARIE SCHOEFF / TRACES When: through Jan. 29 2012 Where: Jane Deering Gallery, 128 E. Canon Perdido St. Gallery hours: 10am-5pm Tues-Sat; Sunday 1-4pm Information: 966-3334, janedeeringgallery.com Longtime Santa Barbara-based artist Marie Schoeff has been intriguing eyes and minds for many years, in various settings, including a pair of notable sightings last fall. She appeared in a selection of local artists' work from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's permanent collection, and shortly thereafter as one of the wedded artists in focus in "Double Trouble: Married to Art and Each Other," a conceptual outing at Arts Fund Gallery. But for a truer taste of Schoeff's recent work and aesthetic thinking, proceed to the Jane Deering Gallery, the impressive new art space on Canon Perdido (which locals may identify as situated between the defunct and beloved Jimmy's Oriental Gardens and the beloved and thriving Sojourner Café). Schoeff's current show, "TRACES," lays out the conceptual gist and the gestural uniqueness of a series of subtle, process-minded variations on the drawing/print theme. Expanding on the implications of her show's title, "TRACES" involves multiple meanings of the "tracing" impulse. Schoeff has established a system of tracing visual and expressive impulses, often animated abstract linear bursts, as an aesthetic modus operandi. But she also uses a personalized technique of tracing and impacting from one drawing to other "ghostly" versions of the original. Fittingly, Schoeff explains that her work deals with the elusive but undeniably pressing concerns of "absence, memory and loss," and that the impetus for much of the visual material rises out of the reality and symbolic portent of the
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