Land(s)cape at Soil. Featuring Julie Albert, Lise Graham and Cable Griffith.
Beloved by grade-school art teachers, cut-out paper on paper collage can easily be overworked and inert, especially the way Alpert makes them, which is stuffed to the gills. And yet, hers work. It’s easy to see the ghost of Romare Bearden in her rough-hewed shapes. She’s going for similar territory too, the crumbling walls and make-do repairs of a rundown urban core.
She hasn’t hitched her wagon to his star, however. His tonalities are dark and tightly orchestrated. Hers have a wider range, with a little zing of wild thing.
If Graham had created the world, buildings would be able to lift themselves off their foundations to dance. They’d settle back without missing a beat or cracking the skulls of their occupants.
Griffith is a pattern painter aspiring to volume. If he painted heads instead of landscapes, he’d give them crew cuts. As his shapes hug the ground, their pastel shades, like yeast in dough, attempt to rise.
Fullness Passing, Patricia Hagen at Punch Gallery through Saturday.
Hagen is interested not in ripeness but what follows it, after the baby’s been fed, the seed has dropped from the pod and the cut flowers have begun to droop in the vase.
Witness, David French at Linda Hodges.
French’s sculptures remind me of keepsakes, something broken off and saved to be passed down from mother to daughter, a moment of youth long gone.
Carrie Marill and Robert Yoder at Howard House.
(Yoder reviewed here. ) Marrill’s men at work: They’re too busy to notice that they’re already gone.
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