GALLERY MEMBERS SHOW

BigTown Gallery, Rochester, VT
Oct 6 – Nov 10

Need a reason to drive three hours into the heart of snow country before any snow even flies? Here’s five: VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN (constructions and collage), LAWRENCE FANE (sculpture), PENELOPE JENCKS (sculpture), NANCY TAPLIN (painting), and HUGH TOWNLEY (sculpture and relief). And one more: you won’t see this assemblage of artists exhibiting together anywhere but at BigTown Gallery’s Gallery Members Show (Oct 6 through Nov 10)—featuring artists selected from BigTown’s first three seasons, each showing new work and older pieces not seen in their respective solo shows.

In only three years, gallery owner and director Anni Mackay seems to have already fulfilled her mandate, that of bringing the best of contemporary fine art to central Vermont. This show not only reminds one of the quality of the work and the maturity of the artists that BigTown has been showing, it provides a wonderful opportunity for the public to see pieces by major artists interacting and resonating with each other.

Jencks, Townley, Boghosian, and Fane, all can be said to have “arrived” at the top stratum of living/working artists, that is, artists whose work is getting peak exposure even as it evinces a visible maturity of process. If, by that standard, Nancy Taplin (at 57, the youngest in this show) has previously been characterized as “emerging,” it is evident in the way her paintings strongly anchor what might otherwise seem a sculpture-heavy show, that she is arriving. Her Bulging at the Base (50 x 64 inches, oil on linen), seems pitched directly between Hugh Townley’s painted wood relief, Mendoda Summer (35 x 23 1/2 inches, painted wood relief), and Wendigo, his large free-standing mahogany piece (39 x 81 inches), almost seeming to form a bridge from one to the other.

Lawrence Fane’s Receivers I and Receivers II chart, as his pieces always do, ever new extensions of the delicacy expressible in wood. Yet they share with Townley’s work that hard-hewn physicality taken to the very edge of refinement. Seen in this context, these pieces seem, as well, to be fully worked-out three-dimensional details of the spirited expression of form so clearly marked as a concern in Taplin’s paintings.

Meanwhile, my favorite piece in the show is Varujan Boghosian’s Untitled (14 3/4 x 17 3/8 inches, construction), wherein a vaguely masculinely-featured antique doll’s head projects from the frame, crowning an otherwise formal portrait. The head looks out with a riveting penetration that seems to follow wherever one moves—a vision altogether too knowing, too all-seeing, despite the seemingly blooded bandage entirely covering its eyes.

And in the finely expressed detail, even the colors, Boghasian’s collage work leads straight to Penelope Jencks’s studies in bronze from her Beach I and Beach II series.

Jencks’s pieces discard the sacredness that seemed to surround Giacometti’s similarly elongated works yet find their own hallowed ground in the intensely personal all-too-human portraits she achieves. Though clearly, achingly resigned to the physical, these pieces seem to succinctly capture the inner lives of their everymen, each displaying in form their own hard truth, as no other will ever know them.

This show will well reward any effort to attend it. Here, one experiences, to delightful degree, the profound chemistry, the multi-lingualed dialog, generated among mature works by differing artists when they get together.

Be advised, too, travelers, of BigTown’s upcoming Holiday Show (Nov 17 through Jan 15), featuring Joan Morris, fabric designer for The Lion King, showing Shibori fabrics overlayed with gold leaf; Liz Quackenbush, noted ceramicist; and Pat Dipaula Klein with abstract silk embroideries on linen.


--—R Skogsberg, 2007

Previously shown at BigTown Gallery, Rochester, VT