The installation, like the two curators' selection of
participants and intriguing theme, set "2Dx3Dx5" apart and make the
group exhibit one of the strongest in the past two decades in
Central Florida.
---Laura Stewart, Fine Arts Writer, Daytona Beach News-Journal
Foreword
Welcome to 2d x 3d x 5, a wonderful creative exhibition at the Ormond
Memorial Art Museum curated by Jeanne Dowis and Charon Luebbers.
You are set to enter upon a unique experience. Leave behind your
preconceived ideas of the style and media of each of the five talented
artists featured in this exhibition. This is an experiment
designed to translate sculpture, the media in which the artists are
most well-known, into a two-dimensional interpretation. The
results are stunning
I would like to thank the curators Charon Luebbers and Jeanne Dowis, as well
as Janet Kilbride, Assistant Director and Theo Lotz, Director of the
University of Central Florida Art Gallery, for loan of the Doris
Leeper work.
Also, a sincere thank you to the catalog contributors: Steve Aimone, Creative
Director, Aimone Art Services; Richard D. Colvin, Curator, Maitland
Art Center; Jeanne Dowis, 2d x 3d x 5 Curator; Charon Luebbers,
Artist and 2d x 3d x 5 Curator; Carla Rossi Poindexter, Painter
and Associate Professor of Art, University of Central Florida; and Dr.
Allan Pratt, Professor of Art History Embry-Riddle Aeronautical
University. In addition, thanks to the Radford University
Foundation Press essayists: Richard Martin, Virginia Rembert, Francis
Martin, Jr., George S. Bolge, Marcia Corbino, and Kyra Belan for their
insightful comments on Dorothy Gillespie.
Enjoy your journey through these new dimensions of art and ideas.
Ann Burt
Director
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2DX3DX5
CREATING ACROSS DIMENSIONS
In research psychology there is the notion that the mere fact of
observing a subject in a research study changes the behavior or
outcome of the study. Without a doubt, the observation effect was in
full force during the preparation for the 2dx3dx5 exhibition
for Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens.
Initially this exhibition was conceived as a presentation of the
two-dimensional works of five sculptors in relation to examples of
their three-dimensional work. Armed with this rather simple concept
and its catchy name, the Museum tapped a group of sculptors, including
two distinguished established artists: Dorothy Gillespie, and the late
Doris "Doc" Leeper, founder of the Atlantic Center for the Arts; and
three emerging artists: Melissa McClellan, Lisa Messersmith-Weaver and
Charon Luebbers.
The exhibition features works by Doris Leeper on loan from the
University of Central Florida including her
signature minimalist metal sculpture and silkscreen "A 70's Vignette."
2dx3dx5 marks one of the first museum exhibitions of Leeper's
works since her death in 2000. Also featured are works by
Gillespie who at 85 continues to exhibit widely her joyfully exuberant
signature enamel-on-metal works in both two and three dimensions.
Knowing the import of exhibiting at the Museum in conjunction with
Gillespie and Leeper, the three emerging artists undertook the
challenges and risks with gusto; ultimately, all three discovered and
broke boundaries between their bodies of 2d and 3d work and innovated
techniques to realize their visions, much like their more famous
co-exhibitors.
Messersmith-Weaver propelled herself to materialize a new body of 2d
work that had been germinating in her imagination for months, one that
transforms printmaking plates into etched and hand-colored “super-low”
sculptural reliefs. McClellan, after struggling with how to get her
low relief stone and glass constructions out from behind shadow box
Plexiglas intermediaries, threw caution to the wind and embarked on an
entirely new direction: a series of minimalist paintings. Luebbers
reached a breakthrough during what, for her, is the least creative
part of preparing for an exhibit (mounting the 2d works for
installation) when she determined to release her "Urban Fossil"
crack-in-the-sidewalk designs by tearing away the tarpaper
background. The resulting wall-mounted cut-out forms became objects
released from the conventional rectangular pictorial plane.
What
is most interesting about the emerging artists’ newest tactics in
executing their two-dimensional bodies of work is that, in all three
cases, these changes in strategy, format and structure demonstrate and
magnify the essence of the artists’ oeuvre, while simultaneously
challenging the very notion of what constitutes a two- or
three-dimensional work. Forays into new artistic techniques, often
using unfamiliar materials to achieve an envisioned result, forced the
artists to reconsider what, precisely, they are attempting to
communicate to the viewer. Surprisingly, for all three, pieces that
are more laborious or difficult to create look simpler and “read”
easier than earlier sculptures and paintings, conveying the artists’
intention and symbolic languages in a more clear and concise manner.
It seems that Luebbers, McClellan, and Messersmith-Weaver are all
happily “coloring outside the lines” to better engage and interact
with the viewer with gorgeous and unexpected results.
Messersmith-Weaver, a printmaker who usually assembles her prints on
paper into sculptural vessel forms, or leaves them conventionally
two-dimensional, is now using etching as an integral design feature of
her newest works. The etched plate becomes both the substrate and the
surface of the work; when the plate is hand-colored and sealed, it
amounts to a “super-low” relief on bronze or copper. In this unusual
yet highly effective way, the artist has successfully combined her 2d
and 3d work processes into singular works, which, depending on the
series, take on either a 2d or a 3d form.
One
series on copper resembles icons in shape and is presented in
two-dimensional format; the pieces are reminiscent of “stations of the
cross,” in the way that their narrative seems to reflect a very
personal spiritual journey, while their spare and bold imagery speaks
to universal themes of isolation and redemption. In another series,
the etched and colored bronze makes up the structure of a
three-dimensional, free-standing sculpture. Here the artist has made
the relief into the form. In both styles, the works are stunning:
highly textural, featuring luminous hues and filled with the symbolic
imagery for which Messersmilth-Weaver is best known.
For
McClellan, primarily a sculptor of clean, minimal works in stone and
glass, one new piece in particular, her "Black and White," a grouping
of small black framed white squares with simple black gestural lines
that mimic chisel marks on stone, speaks volumes. It forms a
sort of wall-hung primer (reminiscent of black chalk on white board)
elucidating the artists' personal visual language.
The
transition from sculpture to painting, McClellan says, is a way for
her to more immediately convey feeling through gesture in mark-making
without the highly physical and time-consuming process of stone
carving. But McClellan does not abandon her sculptor’s perspective to
painterly whim. Significant elements, including framing, found object
inclusion and the boxing-in of subtle lines, influence the spare
compositions and make the experience of viewing the painted pieces
more intimate and singular. This approach also forces the viewer to
interact with the painted gesture on its own, much in the same way one
would contemplate a sculpture, rather than read the work on the
picture plane as one would a more traditional painting. McClellan,
though just beginning to paint in this style, sees her 2d work
transitioning even further: destined for larger-scale conceptual
installation, and using more developed sculptural forms to frame,
encase and lovingly hold the feeling she communicates through mark.
Luebbers, who began her career as a more formal, figurative stone
carver, has for over twenty years painted as well. Now her two very
distinct bodies of work, “Graven Images” in 3d and “Urban Fossils” in
2d, are beginning to converge. Her “Urban Fossil” paintings (a series
of deftly executed representations of actual cracks in sidewalks found
and recorded while walking in urban environments) are becoming more
sculptural, as left-over stone chips and dust are incorporated into
the paint for a rougher texture. Just recently, the artist began
laying down more color in the painted cracks for a more dimensional
effect and then cutting the delineated forms out of the larger
paintings. The new “cut-outs” are now in a format in which the viewer
can better discover what Luebbers sees “between the cracks”: a
figurative image, a letter of the alphabet – the random “message”
captured by the artist and communicated to the viewer. This use of
found images as interpretive narrative is inherently Dadaist and is
unique to Luebbers among the five artists included in 2dx3dx5. Like
McClellan and Messersmith-Weaver, she is striving to communicate with
the viewer through symbols and gestures that indicate feeling, but
here the artist acts more as medium than inventor: she artfully
reveals and translates for the otherwise oblivious viewer the letters,
signals, signs and figures that are so obvious to her and form her
visual vocabulary.
While her painting process has become rather more intricate and
laborious, Luebbers has simplified her sculptural process. Previously,
the artist detailed, smoothed and polished her stones in a more
traditional manner; now, as soon as her message is carved out to its
most basic representation, Luebbers puts her hammer and chisel down,
leaving the stone raw –a crystallized, singular, solid gesture. Both
her 2d and 3d works are marked by similar gestural forms, though the
genesis of those forms is somewhat different. Luebbers says that when
a crack in the sidewalk, caused by the earth’s inherent assertive
nature pushing up through man-made materials, catches her eye, the
earth “speaks” to her; while in her stone carvings, the artist
lets natural materials speak through her. In the lines of a raw
stone, much like in the sidewalk crack, the artist sees a message that
she then sets out to claim as her own: a recognizable form, the shape
of an idea incased in earth that, once carved out and released,
communicates on a symbolic level. In these her most recent works, the
artist’s gesture converges in singular form and texture for the first
time across both dimensions, and is readily recognizable as a
signature style.
The
three emerging artists in 2dx3dx5 are not alone in their search for
materials, nor in their challenge of the formal boundaries of two- and
three-dimensionality, made to better convey their vision and to better
express their signature colors, lines, gestures and forms. Years
before, Gillespie and Leeper were innovative in their approach to
materials and processes, and “crossed the lines” between two and three
dimensionality in their bodies of work. Both Gillespie and Leeper
trained as painters and continued to work in 2d media throughout their
careers, yet both found paper, canvas and conventional painting
techniques lacking, ultimately, as they expanded their oeuvres. They
both also found that sculptural painting, or painting on sculptural
forms of their own creation, best expressed their artistic intent.
Gillespie once described her "aha" moment when she realized that her
color-- her strokes of paint-- did not have to be confined by two
dimensions, by the length and breadth of a canvas or piece of paper.
In that auspicious moment, the artist saw that her paper could bend
and her strokes of paint simply flowed right off the wall and into
space! Gillespie's discovery forged the way for her own signature
style of ribbons of color in her wall hung reliefs and
sculptures-in-the-round.
Many
years of work led up to that moment and so much has transpired since.
Her flexible and fragile paper works gave way to aluminum supports
that allowed her to create lasting monumental public works both
indoors and outdoors. Gillespie broke with traditional painting,
exploding the picture plane by setting color in motion and projecting
it into space. Likewise, she broke with traditional sculpture: her
dancing, ill-defined forms are set apart from more formalist modern
sculptures, usually defined by solid objects with a weighty structured
presence. Critics have described her style as one that “defies
parameter and…any other given geometry,” as “color liberated from the
plane” and as “forms gone awry,” yet until one views a Gillespie
sculpture in person, it is difficult to conceive the activity they
barely contain. Her works full of movement and full of life, Gillespie
is the post-modern electron zipping around her more stolid modernist
predecessors.
The
complete antithesis to Gillespie’s rule-breaking sculptural paintings
is Doris “Doc” Leeper’s painted sculptures, which are studies in geometric
formalism. The artist was obsessed with the triangular form in
particular, which is featured in virtually all of her 2d and 3d works
spanning her 40-plus year career. Leeper saw triangles, spheres,
rectangles and parallelograms as pure and universal forms, using them
almost as her own hand-colored paper shapes to be arranged and
rearranged -- in often monumental scale-- with varying effects on the
artist’s and viewer’s psyches. In this way, her work closely resembles
Rothko and other minimalist or color field painters; the overall
effect of the balance, positioning and the relationship of colors in
concordance or dissonance within the work is of primary import and is
the message of the work.
Leeper had to become more innovative in her approach to painting when
she found the traditional picture plane a hindrance. She began making
two-dimensional paintings in framed and delineated sections, arranging
them in diamonds and other forms to compose a more unified visual
dynamic. Eventually, even the two-dimensional process could not
contain Leeper’s sculptural vision of geometric juxtaposition. Her
metal quilt series, perhaps the most “active” of all her wall-hung
works and composed of numerous, identical square modules detailed with
low-relief triangular forms, gives a feeling of balance and harmony,
while the reflective surface and planar angles create an
ever-changing, multi-dimensional surface.
As
Leeper began creating sculpture, taking her 2d color forms into 3d,
she stated she did so because the forms needed their own space. Soon,
simple three-dimensional geometric forms, arranged and rearranged,
much as in her paintings, became planar, then volumetric sculptures.
The artist made small scale works in simple metals and paint, but to
bring her large-scale works to fruition, she was forced to give over
the fabricating of huge spheres and blocks to those who could build
them to her specifications and who could build them to last. Steel and
automobile enamels soon became her media of choice, as they proved
worthy substrates for the application of pure color; worn timbers, cut
and formed clean, were left bare to suggest age and permanence.
Ultimately, her sculptural series “Ancient Games” echoed and went
beyond the intent of earlier painted works; but her final series,
“Garden Sculpture” surpassed the constraints of Leeper’s usual concern
for relational balance and scale, while capitalizing on her key, basic
forms and gestures, to realize a triumphant vision, finally fully
released from a real or imagined picture plane.
In
viewing works by Gillespie, Leeper, Luebbers, McClellan and
Messersmith-Weaver represented in 2dx3dx5, similarities in
approach to formal artistic tenants of line, form, space, gesture,
color and even intent become apparent; across the five artists, the
works at OMAM, shown in separate galleries, relate well. Of
course, within each gallery representing each individual artist’s body
of work, the similarities across dimensions are much stronger. Indeed,
for these five artists, their works in two and three dimensions, form
movements in the symphony that is their artistic oeuvre, each
dimension as necessary as the other.
2dx3dx5 reveals that all
five artists are successful innovators, risking new methods to achieve
sought-after artistic results. Their visions are not confined by
boundaries conceived for formal convention and critical discussion;
they dance and sway back, forth and between the dimensions. The viewer
may care for a particular period, style, medium or form more than
another within one artist’s body of work, but the choice of dimension,
as we have discovered, fluctuates; it is shaped and molded to fit one
larger message each artist feels compelled to interpret visually for
herself and for us. These artists’ processes are as significant as
their results are engaging. We are fortunate to view together works by
all five and to consider, as we gaze, the concept of creating across
dimensions.
Jeannie Dowis with Charon Luebbers
November 2005
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Foreword
Curatorial Statement
Dorothy Gillespie
Doris
"Doc" Leeper
Charon Luebbers
Melissa
McClellan
Lisa Messersmith-Weaver
