Published in the Weekly Volcano, Feb. 18, 2016
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| “Somewhere between 1st and 2nd,” polychrome inflated steel by Aaron Badham, courtesy University of Puget Sound. |
Aaron
Badham’s playful and inventive sculptures can be seen in the main gallery space
in Kittredge Gallery, University of Puget Sound, while Rita Robillard’s
restful and hotly colorful Pacific Northwest landscapes grace the smaller back
gallery.
I was pleasantly surprised by Badham’s sculpture
after having seen photographs. They are not as monumental as I expected, which
was a slight disappointment (photographs can never capture scale), but the
colors, textures and forms were more interesting and more aesthetically pleasing
than expected (scale is not the only thing photographs fail to adequately
capture.)
Badham’s sculptures are described as soft. I did
not touch them, but they are made of inflated steel, which I suspect would be
hard to the touch, meaning they only look soft — a fun twist on what Claes
Oldenburg did with his soft sculptures of hard objects. Badham seems to have
his tongue firmly planted in cheek. He also has a great feel for abstract form.
Hard or soft, his sculptures are minimalist
abstract forms based on toys and machinery. Most of them combine hard, black,
machine-like clamps and other forms with the more soft-in-appearance inflated
forms that are brightly colored. They also remind me of Mylar balloons. Each is
a single color, some combined with the black parts and some not. The colors are
yellow, blue, white, green, purple and turquoise. The forms are simple and
mostly asymmetrical. Although they look like toys and machines, none are easily
identified, with the possible exception of one called “Somewhere between 1st
and 2nd,” which looks like a plow with five circular disc
blades.
His sculptures have a light-hearted pop-surrealist
feel that I thoroughly enjoyed.
In addition to the sculptures — there are only
seven of them — Badham is showing four nicely executed drawings and a set of
three zinc plate etchings, all of mechanical forms.
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| "Restorations," screen print and acrylic by Rita Robillard, courtesy University of Puget Sound. |
Robillard’s landscapes are traditional scenes of
tall trees created by combining screen printing with acrylic painting. They
stand out due to interesting textures and hot colors that verge on being gaudy.
Some are mist-enshrouded scenes, and some have almost ghostly spatial depth.
This is most noticeable in one called “Pastoral/Tropicalismo,” a scene with
castles in the background and grazing cows in the foreground that look like
they are wading in water or floating above the surface. Overall her paintings
are too decorative for my taste and look as if they were created to be hung in
a medical or real estate office. But I like what she does with space and color,
and there is a mystical quality that I like.
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