Jersey Sure

Robin Rice on Visual Art

by Robin Rice

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It's August. And summertime livin' isn't as easy as usual. A lot of people who would prefer to be sizzling in Paris or Barcelona are opting for less pricey weekends at the Shore or even day trips. Luckily, rumors of art in New Jersey are true, and a lot of it is excellent.

The 14 participants in the third Highwater Sculpture Invitational at WheatonArts include curators Michelle Post and Dave Carrow. The work of this married pair is visually dissimilar but shares a commitment to found objects. Post's "Shaker" sculptures hit you in the eye (in a good way) with brightly painted used furnishings heavily encrusted with shiny vintage china salt shakers. Carrow's sole work in the show, the assemblage Material Culture (pictured), is a bicycle (used by his children and grandchildren) and a couple of other well-worn things confined in something that vaguely resembles a tiger cage. It's mostly earth-colored natural or rusty surfaces. There's more assemblage: Electricity flows literally through Sarah Stengle's neatly improvised Six Fragments, composed of "found objects, jade and junk."

Materials in general are combined in surprising ways. Themes are eclectic. Hank Adams uses copper wire to link chunks of cast black glass and construct the 3-D Still Life No. 5, incorporating a cat and bombs. Natural gray basalt mates perfectly with slotted strata of plate glass in Christoph Spath's abstractly concise Light Passage. Patrick Parsons' compact spherical mixtures of glass, concrete and iron play with translucence and opacity and surface textures. Cast textures dominates Clay Ervin's squared-off clothing in urethane and metal. Sam Geer's Shopping Cart looks like a nasty accident but is actually a well-planned technical feat, while Julia Stratton alludes to Augustus Saint-Gaudens' heroic figure of Diana (made for Madison Square Garden, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) with a small bronze suicide bomber wearing a vest of explosives.

From Millville it's just a hop to Bridgeton and Gallery 50 where Mo Pagano (PAFA class of '61) demonstrates a finely honed painting technique that simultaneously builds an abstract composition and a representation.

Nothing beats a museum as a cool summer sanctuary. Back across the river in Philly, the PMA's Perleman Building is headlining sculptor Alexander Calder. He's famous for one thing: mobiles. He invented them and, though legions of art students have been forced to make them, Calder is the only one who ever got anywhere with them. We're familiar with his witty wire circus; now we have a major show of his jewelry.

These pieces may be Calder's most delightful accomplishment. His mobiles are often described as "drawing in space" and, when you get down to it, his work is all about lines — explicit or implicit. Jewelry is an ideal form for him because of the way it relates to and defines three dimensions in the form of a moving human body. Calder loved bold, body-embracing designs. He didn't cast but worked directly with metal sheets and, especially, wire. Arcs and spirals leap like waves and skim shoulders and torsos. There's a link with African jewelry and its linear forms, but much of Calder's thinking seems strikingly original.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

2008 Highwater Sculpture Invitational Through Sept. 1, Gallery of Fine Craft, WheatonArts & Cultural Center, 1501 Glasstown Road, Millville, N.J., 800-998-4552, wheatonarts.org

Morel Pagano: Italy and America through My Eyes Through Aug. 29, Gallery 50, 50 E. Commerce St., Bridgeton, N.J., 856-575-0090, gallery50.org