Published in the Weekly Volcano April 16, 2015
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| Gallery installation view with Kyle Dellehay sculpture in foreground |
For its 50th
anniversary Tacoma Community College features works by current and former art
instructors and alumni, and it’s one of the better shows I’ve seen there in
quite some time.
Entering the gallery,
you’re faced with a wall of circular shapes in shades of white and brown that
looked to me like oversized sand dollars. My wife, who attended the show with
me, thought they looked like extremely thin slices of wood. The piece is called
“Consumption.” It’s by Kyle Dillehay, and it’s made of 69 coffee filters
stained with coffee and water and arranged in a grid with a single empty space
disrupting the otherwise perfect symmetry. It’s a wonderful piece of wall
sculpture.
In many ways, Dillehay
dominates this show through the variety, number and inventiveness of his work.
In addition to the coffee filter piece there is an installation called
“Process” that is like a museum ode to photography and printing with many
photographed faces on glass plates arranged on a table with photographic
equipment, and on the wall behind them are prints of faces presumably made from
the same or similar glass plates. I loved the subtle variety of colors in the
soft-focus prints and the antique look of the installation.
Another Dillehay piece dominates
the back section of the gallery. It is a sculpture with three large honeycombs
set in a wooden tray that balances at an extreme angle on a stand that is a
tree branch.
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| Painting from the “Biome” series by Merit Berg |
I
was impressed with Merit Berg’s four oil paintings from the “Biome” series, each
on a canvas shaped like a house with a peaked roof. In each of the four there
are three layers of imagery. The lower level is a landscape. On the middle
layer are rectangular shapes painted in flat colors that look like windows in
one of the paintings and like floating monoliths in the others, and on the top
layers are contour drawings of birds and animals. All of the animals, being
contours only, appear to be transparent. The beauty of these paintings is that
the images, while clearly layered one on top of the other, do not violate the
integrity of the flat picture plane (a concept from Greenbergian formalism that
remains important today, despite claims to the contrary by many contemporary
critics).
The show also features a
lot of nicely-done ceramic vessels by various artists, one of the nicest of
which is a water jar by Anthony Gaudino; a delightful group of gouache
paintings of ceramic dogs by Melinda Liebers Cox; and a terrific little
painting by Frank Dippolito of a flock of crows flying close to the ground with
a black hashtag floating in the clouds.
There are too many others
of note to mention them all, but I will close with pointing out one other
series of digital prints on what the wall label calls “time warp inkjet paper.”
By The pieces in the series by Anthony Culang are called “Rift#1,” “Expand #2”
and “Rip#3,” each is an image of a woman in a red dress on what appears to be a
floor of concrete tiles. The woman’s body is distorted as in a funhouse mirror,
and the floor undulates in waves. These are strange and fascinating images.
"TCC
50," noon to 5 p.m.
Monday-Friday, through April 30, Tacoma Community College, Building 5A,
entrance off South 12th Street between Pearl and Mildred, Tacoma, visitor
parking in Lot G.
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