At BAM, Tip Toland's stoneware figures celebrate the inner spirit
Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, October 23, 2008
Tip Toland's life-sized, stoneware figures carry their weight lightly. None of her stunted children, naked elderly or solitary middle-aged is bogged down by class, oddity or circumstance.
In lesser hands, they'd be freaks. In hers, they are transformed by material evidence of inner light. Her influences extend to the Northern High Renaissance, particularly painter Matthias Grunewald's spirit-struck, gargoylish crowd scenes.
A contemporary Northern expressionist such as Odd Nerdrum means less to her. Nerdrum's figures are sunk in sepia-toned gloom. Like Grunewald's, Toland's are distinct and their distortions earned by their character.
"Tip Toland: Melt, the Figure in Clay" at the Bellevue Arts Museum is a small exhibit with a haunting resonance. Its achievement is a long time coming. A tired kind of Surrealism bogged down her earlier work. Although her skill was never in doubt, skill for its own sake, wrote poet Charles Wright, is like the spider's web without the spider: "It can catch, but it cannot kill."
Her new work kills.
Blue veins run faintly under the skin of the sleeping woman in "Milk for the Butter Thief." The model is a friend who was willing to take her off clothes and fall asleep as the artist studied her. With eyes closed, the old woman is awake in the world of the spirit.
The ambiguous sexual status of Grace in "Grace Flirts" is meticulously detailed. Wearing a saggy yellow swimsuit and fake Halloween lips, she kids around with the discomfort her existence elicits in others.
In "Middlemarch," George Eliot wrote about the burden of heightened awareness: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
Toland makes art on the other side of silence, rooted in the real but mystically madcap, a celebration of the childhood game in which "all the outs are in free."
Again, like Toland who is decades her senior, Ichikawa's earlier work is a shadow of what's on view. While her technical abilities have always excited a curious interest, her product fell short. In her new drawings and a video installation titled "Traces of the Molten State," she at last marks what she calls the moment between the "ephemeral and the eternal."
The moment is marked by dark bowls of orange light spilling down the page to release dreamy calligraphies. The silky uncoiling of her gestural jet streams announces a credible glass-art version of Action Painting.
The installation at her exhibit's center, titled, "Walk With Mist," is a pond made of small glass jars hanging from fishing wire and casting shadows underneath. A video image projected on their surface is of paper burning. The abstract image looks like a funeral barge: fire inside an ash exterior that throws off sparks, as odd as it is lovely.
After the Bellevue Arts Museum folded in 2003, it determined to reopen as a craft museum.
The Shull exhibit is the kind of show BAM detractors feared. It features cute furniture and painting plus bench combos that lose their visual flavor faster than sugarless gum.
The damaged wood he found and painted from trees downed by hurricanes suggests he has somewhere to go, although he's not there yet. These ravaged bases do not relate to the patterns painted on their surfaces.