If as John Russell maintained, a “painting is a vegetable construct that changes in time,” a sculpture is a mineral construct whose longevity is marked by change.
Greek and Roman statuary is famous for the thousand-yard stare in its wide and empty eyes, but the Greeks and Romans who made it wouldn’t know it from Adam. They painted their product with dark eyes and even eyelashes. (Think Goth, ancient world version.) Part of our relationship with the work is with what time, not artists, made.
Los Angeles sculptor Tanya Batura makes earthenware busts airbrushed with acrylic paint. They look fetal, even though drawn from adult models. Blank but wounded, they are gestating in time’s garden, perfect but born past an unattainable prime.
At James Harris Gallery through June 19.
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