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RECYCLE THIS: David Bruce's Reverence, made from grass segments.
The Smallest Footprint
Through Oct. 26
Mayer Fine Art
803-4749, www.mayerfineartgallery.com
This is not your typical "green" show. Absent are all social and political agendas, though as a Vespa-riding, Prius-driving citizen, I’m all for hard-hitting environmental messages via art. But this isn’t that.
Instead, gallery owner Sheila Giolitti has assembled the work of four artists—two men and two women, two from Hampton Roads and two from away—who bring in green through the back door.
Hampton Roads-based May Britton recycles magazine pages and newsprint to create figurative papier-mâché pieces assembled and protected with natural and non-toxic glues and air drying shellac. As Giolitti points out, Britton’s "earth-friendly" art looks "flashy" rather than "earthy." Downright sexy is an empty body-hugging dress sculpture entitled Salsa. Suspended from the ceiling in the path of an air conditioner vent, her carefully observed and formed female surrogate moves with a spicy gyration that mimics Latin dancing in a delightfully convincing way.
The only shortcoming of David Bruce’s work is that there is not more of it. Originally, the artist was contracted to exhibit additional pieces but, for whatever reason, he delivered only Reverence to the gallery. Reclaimed from the landscape in Appomattox where he now resides, grass segments joined with knots comprise the deliberately amorphous form. And a lovely open-work form it is.
Bruce describes his process of construction as "meditative," an almost spiritual expression of resourcefulness and reverent appreciation for the land. He seeks not the literal, but the ambiguous, allowing viewers to free-associate. On one level, the piece may be associated with our forefathers’ traditional methods of weaving baskets and nets.
 May Britton's Salsa reinvents cover-girl style.
Leading D.C.-area eco-artist, Erwin Timmers, is co-founder and director of the Washington Glass School. His work departs from what is typically thought of in regard to the studio glass movement in that he has developed a process for melting and molding tempered window glass, one of the least recycled materials. So refined and restrained are many of his two-dimensional glass relief pieces in their urban metal frames—some lit from behind with neon—that they share a kinship with "bank art," the kind of beautiful, sleek and non-controversial pieces that grace bank lobbies.
But quite a departure from that aesthetic is a piece like Cobra Head #10. Though the sculpture had not arrived when I viewed the show on opening day—it and a couple of others were whisked in prior to the reception—photographs reveal this rolling floor lamp with its flexible gooseneck to be a quasi-functional form with industrial, medical and vaguely threatening undertones.
Norfolk-based Virginia Van Horn’s bats do not impress any more in this setting than they did when exhibited previously—also close to Halloween—at the TCC VAC. However, we can forgive her the bats because of, especially, three other stellar pieces from her menagerie in which she often repurposes humble materials.
Her interest in animals as surrogates for human beings and with animals’ "unsettling intrusion into our world" is perhaps best represented by Pandora’s Box or Silk Stockings. In the former, the head of a large black crow—an archetypal messenger—peers out of a simple dark barn form suggesting a narrative with psychological dissonance not unlike a Chris Van Allsburg children’s story.
In the latter, the body of a running horse, sculpted in relief from brown paper towels and wax, is attached to a peeling wood and rusted metal panel with the look and feel of an architectural fragment. Suspended from the bottom of the panel are four stuffed horse leg forms. With indeterminate poetic meaning, the piece evokes nostalgia for the past while creating a clash between societal strictures and the perceived freedom of the natural world.
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