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Publication: Journal Santa Fe Section; Date: Jul 8, 2011; Section: Gallery Guide; Page: S8 OPEN TO INTERPRETATION Eclectic sculptures, both bold and delicate, can mean so many things Art Issues MALIN WILSON-POWELL For the Journal For the month of July, in the often quiet, off-thebeaten-path Bellas Artes gallery in the Compound complex on Canyon Road, the pulse has been quickened by the work of Judy Pfaff. To celebrate her 20-year association with the gallery, the artist came to Santa Fe to install a sampling of her finely tuned signature works. They are works of astonishing tenderness and vitality and cause for celebration. Upon entering the first gallery, a viewer will face an installation called “Lay There By the Juniper” that at first seems to simultaneously tumble, drift, float and glow. A large wall-mounted Plexiglas disk interacts with a “black light” resulting in both a gentle, overall swoony-moony aspect of color in the disk as well as a line of ultra-violet zipping around the edge. Large Chinese paper globe lanterns in soft shades of blue and moon-glow green levitate leftward, and a white wire line meanders downward toward a snaggle of gnarly, tuberous roots, oily iridescent foam, and desiccated pleated foil decorations. Its transparent gauze drapery and silk flowers are alive to breezes. There are also blue zip ties, painted twigs, and dangling electrical elements. There are so many different through lines to follow with so many different velocities operating, it should be a mess. But it all works. It is generous, sure-footed, and sweetly tentative in its vulnerability. For almost 40 years, Pfaff’s art has been so profoundly oriented and grounded that she consistently makes material objects that express both structure and spaciousness. Her work has physical weight and an emotional gravitas at the same time as the universal human heliotropic propensity to rise up from crawling to standing to looking around with unshackled perceptions. Her work is both rooted and buoyant in an intelligence that speaks to the human potential for discernment. With age, her work becomes increasingly adroit and spot-on. A virtuoso of large-scale installations since the 1970s, an era of geometric progressions in sculpture, Pfaff came to make her space-time generators from a different sensibility. Beginning as a painter, she questioned everything about sculpture and has changed the nature of sculpture into a dynamic exchange between the inside and outside of human experience. Anyone who has seen her encompassing installations knows how fully she meets the different conditions of each place she transforms. While each has an entirely different timbre specific to the circumstances, they all place the viewer inside an enveloping membrane. Everyone will find different physical and metaphorical sensations here, based upon the tuning of their being. The parable of the six blind men and the elephant, each confident in their descriptions of different aspects of the elephant, is akin to encountering Pfaff’s work. In fact, her 1995 installation at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University was titled “Elephant” in recognition of the immense variety and potential for specific textural, sensate experiences. What makes all this possible is Pfaff’s ability, in every circumstance, to reliably and firmly realize a unique structural scaffold in sync with her omni-directional activation of space. Pfaff’s Bellas Artes exhibition, however, is not a whole gallery installation. It is a hybrid of discrete objects primarily composed in her studio that have a decidedly Asian cast, featuring paper and bamboo lanterns and shades. In addition to one older wall piece from 1992, there are five recent framed paper works, and six wall sculptures, two of which she developed in situ as installations that spill onto the floor. They are in the first gallery, where the lighting is low. Next to “Lay There By the Juniper” is the turbulent construction titled “The Infamous Amanitas,” where a tornado of red paper lanterns OPEN TO INTERPRETATION http://epaper.abqjournal.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=Ol... 1 of 5 7/22/11 10:05 AM
