– In which Dorn misinterprets an Art Show.
didn’t expect to be writing about art again so soon, but yesterday evening we went to an art show of one of Kathleen’s old friends from her days teaching at GWU, that turned out to be a lot of fun for me, and worth remarking about.
It’s a two-person show called “Umbra” by Kathleen’s friend Becky Bafford and fellow sculptor Kini Collins, at the Horowitz Center at Howard County Community College.
As the title suggests, the show is about shadows, and every piece is created and displayed in a way that allowed its shadow to be part of the art. The pieces themselves are sculpture, so you have a nice three-dimensional foreground and two-dimensional light-dark background going on.
The show is also about “fossils, relics, and memories”, according to the brochure, and I thought it did a good job of evoking things past and gone. Many of the pieces are representative (or partly so) of objects found in nature, as the wall of chrysalis shapes above.
What I liked best were some shapes by Becky Bafford that triggered my delight response at two things I enjoy contemplating–(1) art that I don’t quite understand at a rational level, and (2) written languages that I don’t know. There were a series of shapes there that to me felt like they were three-dimensional calligraphy, spelling out a message I couldn’t quite grasp.
Looking at these shapes, it was possible to imagine the pushes, pulls, and gestures that went into forming each one. It was like watching one of those TV documentaries with a closeup of a Chinese national treasure slowly composing text in freehand chinese characters with a sumi brush, only with the added complexity that the character strokes all had depth, as well as width and height.
What a rich language that would be, that it had to be written in three dimensions! It was a conceit that really appealed to me, despite my suspicion that I had probably missed what the artist was envisioning when she created them.
The works by the two artists complement each other extremely well, both in mood and in the skill and subtlety of the use of surface and shadow. Moving from Ms Bafford’s room to Ms Collins’s, I was delighted to see another piece that reinforced my interpretation–there was a wall devoted to what looked the world to me like three-dimensional Babylonic cuneiform! (My photo doesn’t really do it justice.) The title of this piece was “Letters”, which makes me optimistic that maybe here I was even thinking along similar lines to the artist.
Even setting aside my personal twist on the work here, the show was a treat to see–the works are well made and artfully displayed, and evoked strong emotional reactions in the audience there. An evening well spent! Here’s the show info, if you find yourself near there with a few minutes to spend. The show runs until Sept 22.
Thanks,
Dorn
9/13/2019