Diverse Paths to the Heart of Matters
Atlanta Journal Constitution, Mar. 28, 1997
"Diverse Paths to the Heart of Matters", by Jerry Cullum
"Pith" is a show of paintings and drawings by younger artists, curated for this alternative space by founding director Colleen Maria Casey. "Pith" is, indeed, pithy in all senses of the term, from vigorous and compact to, occasionally, spongy.
The show opens with surprisingly strong large-scale nudes (mostly male) painted on Plexiglas by Raul Miar. In this company, Angela Buxbaum's sensitve nude self-portraits appear less strong than they otherwise would, though Buxbaum is gathering a following with her psychologically tinged explorations of her physical self.
After all this drama in the front gallery, Jennifer J. L. Jones's understated abstractions require some downtime to allow for proper viewing. But they reward quiet contemplation in their combination of small figurative elements (such as a tiny airplane in "Flight") with deftly rendered patches of abstract color.
At the far end of the back gallery, James Hull evokes maps of landforms with his combinations of rusted metal and patches of gilt--typically, it's the golden sections that form the geograheic elements alluded to in the title, as in, for example, "Microgeography (Continent)."
LiShinault --the artist prefers this one-word contraction of her given name--contributes some lifesize paintings of striking-looking young women, as armless as the Venus de Milo, but clad in evening gowns and otherwise distinctly un-Venuslike. They wear resigned or sullen expressions and have long red gloves hung around their necks; the latter are presumably penance for being, in the words of the captions painted above them, "Difficult Women." LiShinault's distinctive technique of stitching fine-grained canvas to coarse burlap is used more effectively in the older, more complex work that forms the centerpiece to this installation, but the painting technique of the newer pieces serves her purposes well.
Jennifer Ray's delicate surrealistic pencil drawings are, in many the most appealing part of the whole exhibition. Her "Title Upon Request" series fetures some of the standard metaphors of psychological depth or entrapment--figures enclosed undergroun, a perl diver reaching for oysters on the sea bottom, a hand emerging from an egg or a leg emerging from a fleshy tropical leaf. But they are all executed in an adroit, whimsical style that hovers somewhere between fairy tale illustration and classic surrealist paintings such as Dorothea Tanning's "Night of the Sunflower."
