Off the Grid
Robin Rice on Visual Art
Is there any one person who would purchase work from both Nancy Middlebrook's and Daniel Cutrone's concurrent shows at Snyderman Gallery? Each artist is accomplished in a traditional discipline and each charts an original and visually sumptuous course through what could easily become familiar territory. Nevertheless, their work is separated by chasms of difference in organization and concept.
In the vignettes he's showing, sculptor Cutrone displays mastery of blowing and casting glass and of various surface techniques as well as knowledge of art history and popular culture. M and M wittily confronts a naturalistic cast glass head of the Madonna with a blown vessel of chaste neoclassical symmetry. Pictures of the second M, domestic goddess Martha Stewart, float on the jar's surface and are reflected in a mercury silver underlayer.
The wall-mounted works in Cutrone's "Wallpaper Series" are the most elegant in this group. The black on white Arbutus wallpaper doesn't appear to be an exact transcription of William Morris' "Arbutus" design, but the link is obvious. A kiln-cast shelf supports a hand, a cup and a spouted vessel descended from Greece through Rome to the effete attenuations of Dante Marioni. In the almost Pompeiian red-on-black Poppy Field "Wallpaper," printed blossoms pour like wine from an overturned glass.
Meanwhile, the diaphanous I Sogni with its cluster of clear and mirrored objects layered with shadows invites the viewer to dream rather than to think.
Perhaps a similar open invitation inhabits Middlebrook's small double-weave pictures. Each relies upon modulated hand-dyed fibers and an intricate weaving technique to build a surface of shimmering light and shadow. Luminous richness belies the regularity of expanding and contracting grids and confounds the perception of interpenetrating figure and ground.
Middlebrook devoted a 2007 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship grant to the printing of a (mostly pictures) volume on her work. Not only was this a smart career move, at $20 it gives fans of her work the opportunity to acquire beautiful facsimiles at a reasonable cost.
Dan Cutrone: Images and Icons Nancy Middlebrook: Selections 1996-2007
Through Sept. 29
Snyderman-Works Galleries
303 Cherry St.
215-238-9576
www.snyderman-works.com
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