On Mass

Is the pairing of glass and ceramics at the Art Alliance a sign of things to come?

by Robin Rice

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Published: Mar 6, 2007

No one at the Art Alliance would comment on rumors of a planned shift to an all-crafts exhibition focus. But if the current pairing of ceramics and glass in the Second Floor Galleries is a harbinger of the future, such a scheme should work out fine.

The literal centerpiece of the second floor is "Gravity," a glass-based multimedia installation by Jon Clark and Angus Powers. It can be experienced from one vantage point only: a doorway opening onto a darkened room. Lights flash erratically from a giant suspended globe resembling a piebald disco ball, illuminating a pathway between fields of transparent glass plants. Ankle-high vegetation on the right is probably largely recycled from the fragile armies of sprouts in Clark's earlier installations. Taller stalklike plants are massed on the left.

A successful installation like this one transcends its component parts. Angus Powers fabricated many glass plants for Clark's earlier works. Here, Powers' penchant for bold, sometimes cartoonlike scientific references meshes effectively with Clark's more literal imagery. Jesse Daniels' pulsing, machinelike sound environment punctuated with tracer sizzles amps up the sense of grinding energy that seemingly emanates from the mysterious central sphere.

The intensity of the experience, in its dramatically forced perspective and contrasts between insubstantiality and mass, darkness slashed by light, suggested to one viewer that this is anti-Thomas Kincaid art: anything but pretty, pastel, soothing and pseudo-profound.

In both flanking galleries, Bean Finneran's "Realms" works are fragile yet experientially substantial. Finneran stacks and intertwines "curves," the word she uses to describe thousands of identical extruded ceramic pieces. Utterly minimal, rigorous and pristine, Finneran's piles of clay jackstraws project a unique provisional energy. Their lacy modularity obliquely complements the masses of glass plants in "Gravity."

Each Finneran work is essentially monochromatic, though the artist tipped each curve with a dab of glaze. Not the biggest, but among the most appealing, are three Cones: buttery yellow, cool Dreamsicle orange and a kind of fleshy azalea pink. Austere but yummy.

A group of Finneran's painted wall-mounted Plexiglas circles is handsome but seemed more a distraction than an enhancement of the overall experience.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Gravity: A Glass And Multimedia Installation By Jon Clark And Angus Powers With Sound By Jesse Daniels

Realms: New Ceramics By Bean Finneran

Through May 6,Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. 18th St., 215-545-4302,

 

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