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ASHLEY KISTLER
Disguise the Limits: Sculpture & Drawing
by John Newman
The Hand Workshop Art Center's exhibition of work
by New York artist John Newman coincides with the installation of his
public art commission for Richmond's new Main Street Station. For that
downtown site, Newman created a 22-foot-high airborne sculpture entitled Skyrider, which
now floats beneath the crisscrossing network of overpasses and train
trestles across from the station. He used an earlier piece, Homespun
(with travel notes), as a conceptual point of departure, translating
its component parts into monumental forms fabricated in aluminum. Featuring
this and other works produced by the artist over the last five years, Disguise
the Limits provides a broader context in which to consider his Main
Street Station commission.
Born in 1952, Newman came of age during an era when
Minimalism and its spare geometric forms held sway. "When I was a student," he
says, "it was all about being essential and exclusive and refined and
simple in a formal sense." Newman's subsequent development as a sculptor
reverses that headlong movement, embracing a process that is additive
rather than subtractive, intuitive rather than cerebral. His work opens
up an imaginative space, as writer Raphael Rubinstein described it, "in
which unexpected conjunctions are the rule, in which theory bows to intuition
and humor, and associative imagery runs riot." From Italian Baroque statuary
to Alexander Calder's delicately balanced sculptures and John Chamberlain's
exuberant found-metal assemblages, he has drawn inspiration from disparate
sources as he freely improvises and invents.
Newman's ever-expanding repertoire of materials and
techniques has been shaped in part by his extensive travels in India,
China, Japan, and Africa and the local craftspeople he encountered there.
With unexpected results that include illusionistic effects more often
associated with painting, he employs an astonishing array of ingredients
either derived from indigenous handicrafts, fabricated in the studio,
or collected as found objects. Newman has described his sculptures as
complex, awkward, funny, strange, and itchy. In terms of both material
and image, he also calls them slippery. "Sometimes I really like the
fact that you have no idea what a work is made of, or how it was made," he
says, "let alone what it is. All that slipperiness is part of the piece." These
qualities jostle each other in his idiosyncratic creations so that we
can never quite name what appears before us, though we are compelled
to try and do so.
Drawing has always constituted a fundamental aspect
of Newman's artistic practice. "Drawing allowed me to create a vocabulary
and to set up the challenge of using new materials," he notes. While
this activity sometimes becomes an integral element within the sculptures
themselves, more often it functions as a kind of sculptural conceit.
Adroit at moving between two and three dimensions as well as between
materials, Newman renders improbable forms and structures on paper and
then proceeds to build them, addressing engineering challenges as formidable
as Piranesi's 18th–century architectural labyrinths might pose. "A
drawing can also be a provocation, a spatial impossibility," he continues, "and
a call to materially manifest that impossibility in real space."
Newman borrowed the title he has given this exhibition
from a work by sculptor John Chamberlain, and it reflects his longstanding
fondness for puns. On the one hand, Disguise the Limits evokes the exigencies
inherent in the sculptural process, whether it is undertaken on an intimate
or a monumental scale. In keeping with his notion of sculpture as "an
instrument of contemplation," Newman's title also alludes to the objective
of creating, for both maker and viewer, an open-ended realm in which
the sky's the limit.
John Newman's Disguise the Limits showed
at the Hand Workshop Art Center in Richmond, Virginia, from November
17, 2003 - January 18, 2004.
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