Published in the Weekly Volcano, Feb. 4, 2016
“All Lines in the Water,” mixed media by Shannon Weber, courtesy B2 Fine Art Gallery |
Winter Pop-Up at B2
Fine Art Gallery is a surprisingly rich collection of sculpture, basketry and
pottery by (mostly) artists who are new to the Tacoma art scene — the one
exception being longtime local favorite Ric Hall, who is showing here totally
new work never before seen and a radical departure from what we’re used to
seeing from him.
"Apple Pruning" by Ric Hall, courtesy B2 Gallery. |
More on Hall’s painted apple prunings and
mixed-media sculptures by Shannon Weber later, but first an overview of the
show. Featured artists are Hall, Weber, Mary Hosick, Sharon Feeney, Steve
Sauer, and Patty McPhee. There are some nicely executed and rather traditional
ceramic and sculptural work by Hosick, Feeney, and McPhee. I was especially
impressed with Hosick’s ceramics and also liked McPhee’s sensual and minimalist
wood carvings of abstract forms based on the female figure and Feeney’s
asymmetrical, half-moon shaped “Budding.” Sauer’s massive ceramic fertility
vessels are rough, gritty and powerful. While modernistic in style and form,
they evoke ancient and primitive art that grabs at the gut and won’t let go.
Hosick warrants a show all her own, and her
work is relegated to a separate room in the gallery with a selection of 14
felted wool and silk and stoneware pots. The smaller pots with felted wool and
silk patches adhered to the surface like organic accretions present wonderfully
contrasting textures and glazes. Her pieces with sculpted tubes going through
and out of ceramic forms are like Stone Age scientific instruments left on
earth by an alien race. One piece that is different from all her others is
“Flight Patterns,” a playful and decorative mixed-media sculpture with
butterfly wings fluttering in front of a blue circle with another of her tubes
piercing the whole. There is a shamanistic quality to her pottery.
Now back to Hall and the other surprising
find in this show: Weber. Their pieces in this show have a decidedly outsider
appearance like the works of untrained, often insane and artistically obsessed
artists, and yet they are clearly educated and well versed in art history,
theory and practice.
Hall is locally famous for
cubist-surrealistic pastel paintings done in collaboration with his partner in
crime, Ron Schmitt. What he is showing here is a collection of
about 15 painted prunings from an apple tree. In one cubbyhole section of the gallery
13 small pieces line the walls on shelves mounted about five feet off the
floor. They are knotted, gnarled and sensual, and painted with bright colors
with thick and often clotted paint that brings into view figures and faces
suggested to the artist’s fertile imagination by the shapes of the limbs. Study
them carefully and you’ll find an almost infinite number of surprises. In
another nearby section of the gallery are a couple more of these, but they are
larger and more expansive, with long limbs that reach as if soaring into space.
Weber is showing a number of fantastic
sculptures both free-standing and wall hanging created out of a mixture of
unusual materials including sticks, bones, kelp and many other found materials.
They are enigmatic and strangely beautiful, and evoke Northwest Native American
art. There is one piece that is a large ball of impossibly bent and twisted
sticks. I can’t imagine how she managed to weave them together in such a
manner. Another, “3 Moons,” is a burnt piece of wood, smooth as polished rock,
with a smaller and differently burned hunk of wood that looks like charcoal
mounted on top. It is as rough as the other is smooth, and dead center on it
are three little button-like moons stitched to the burnt wood with kelp and
waxed Lenin thread. It is beautiful and yet ominous. Next to “3 Moons” is “All
Lines in the Water,” a small canoe shape with five little woven baskets stuffed
inside like men crammed into a too-small boat. It is made of kelp pieces, fish
bones, reclaimed washers and other exotic materials.
There is little time left to see this show. I
strongly suggest you see it as soon as possible.
Winter Pop-Up, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, till 9 p.m. through Feb. 13, 711
St. Helens Avenue, Tacoma, 253.238.5065.
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