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Indepth Arts News:
"Completely Fabricated: New Sculpture by Paul Meneses and Steve Novick"
2001-07-06 until 2001-08-11
Gallery at Green Street
Boston, MA,
USA United States of America
Paul Meneses and Steve Novick update traditional and non-traditional approaches
to fabrication in the July exhibit at Green Street. Meneses rolls, bends, cuts
and welds sheets of steel stock into large, dynamic sculptures. Novick
fabricates smaller scale sculptures by ingeniously recombining parts a different
kind of stock - outdated hardware stock and parts of appliances and metal sold at thrift
stores. The similarities between the minimal elegance and flawless transitions
between forms that both of these artists achieve is remarkable, as is the
contrast between the techniques used.
Novick uses an additive process combining disparate flanges, escutcheons and
housings into a new hybrid of an ambiguous type. Novick creates sculptures
which look familiar, perched on shelves and often at the scale that references
an appliance, but with no cord or function ( in the hardware store sense of the
word ). The artist substitutes smooth, rounded volumes, gleaming with visual
clarity in the place of a handy kitchen use. The transformation from functional
object to aesthetic object is convincing and builds upon the residue of a
previous design style and purpose that the individual chrome, rubber, felt and brass
elements effortlessly transcend as a whole.
Meneses welds plates of steel into massive rectilinear forms that are human
scale and then implies that they can be manipulated by introducing a central, curved
segment. A long horizontal slab is established with a narrowed neck which seems
compressed until it has smoothly buckled downward. In another work this
narrowed section bends into a half cylinder to allow the overall slab to fold in
half. Once a viewer has established the similarities between the two works, which
are identical except for their articulation at a central juncture, the
transition between one and the other is effectively implied. The idea of bending
or compressing
these huge thick slabs seems, for a moment, quite possible.
Meneses lives in Jamaica Plain, is an extraordinarily talented welder and has a
long history in metalsmithing, small metals and custom fabrication for
commercial clients. Novick lives in Somerville, is a gifted writer, art critic
and a teacher at the New England School of Art and Design. The strength of each
artists work is rooted in an understanding of the materials they are working
with, but gracefully transcends a purely formal aesthetic by contradicting or
manipulating our associations with these elements through variations in scale
and placement.
IMAGE:
Paul Meneses,
Untitled (2001)
Fabricated Steel
100 x 24 x 12h
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