March 28, 1999
HELEN A. HARRISON
‘Women’s Work’
Nese Alpan Gallery, 1499 Old Northern Boulevard, Roslyn. Through April 9. 484-7238.
Anyone expecting to find the gallery filled with needlepoint or decorated china may be startled by this group show, which has nothing in common with such traditional female pursuits. The 11 artists are represented by work that resists typecasting by the sex of its makers.
Many of the pieces are small, trading on the intimacy of scale to force close scrutiny. Eleanor Schimmel’s encaustic paintings, for example, feature richly encrusted lozenges that hover mysteriously in ambiguous space. Their texture and mood recall the landscapes of Albert Pinkham Ryder, but without Ryder’s explicit symbolism. There are similar overtones in Paulette Singer’s “Little Black” and “Little Red,” in which looming figurelike shapes suggest ominous presences emerging from an otherworldly environment.
In a painting that would fit well into the “Wordsmiths” show in Islip, Hester Simpson uses a penmanship exercise to demonstrate how writing is really a type of abstraction. The letter e becomes a series of connected loops that scroll endlessly across the tiny canvas and seem to rise up through its surface, remaining readable even as they are transformed into pure linear rhythm.
With minimal means, Katie Seiden describes “Marriage” as a relationship that unites and entangles. Like Ms. Simpson’s continuous line, her strands of wire simplify their message without sacrificing meaning. Marcia Widenor’s “Imaginary Tree,” one of the largest works, is also built of a continuous thread, although here it is woven into a net that descends from the ceiling to root itself in the floor. More skeletal than substantial, the tree of Ms. Widenor’s imagination is a fragile net.
Another imposing piece, Lois Polansky’s “Caidoz/Zodiac,” is a personal meditation on the astrological system. Using newspaper clippings to represent events in time, the artist has created a fascinating amalgam of past and future that simultaneously looks back and ahead.