CRAWLERS: "If these are earthworms, they’re on amphetamines."
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Tucked into a low-slung, century-old brick building in an industrial neighborhood not far from Boston Medical Center is one of Boston’s best-kept gallery secrets. Inching into its second decade under the shrewd stewardship of John Colan, Hallspace belongs to that rare echelon of art galleries where the quality of the work supersedes the bottom line. The current exhibit of South Africa-born, now Boston-based Sophia Ainslie underscores Hallspace’s place as an important showcase for provocative, meaningful art.Had the gallery director not told me that the clear glass vase filled with dirt is home to 14 earthworms and that the sometimes sprawling, sometimes refined, and invariably energetic abstract images that fill the gallery reflect the artist’s preoccupation with the creatures, I wouldn’t have known. No matter. Spiraling charcoal-black forms abound, rarely reminiscent of earthworms; they appear to be moving at a tremendous velocity and rarely come to an end. A tangle of what look like cornucopias, ribbed hoses, fungi, and intestines occupy an entire wall where different-sized sheets of paper fit together to become an erratic collage. If these are earthworms, they’re on amphetamines. Some writhe, others encircle each other, loop, squeeze, snake, and stretch in a bizarre drama of subterranean drive, a living magma in which everything connects and no strand can be followed.
Ainslie’s compositional sense is astute; she applies color with spare precision. On the left side of the gigantic, visceral hodge-podge called Crawlers 3, mustard yellow runs through the shifting forms, but only down the middle of the mountainous debris. On the right side (the work almost qualifies as a diptych, with its two distinct masses joined by a pair of dark, thick chutes), a rich brown glazes a heart-shaped area in the upper reaches of the complementary heap. Yet for all the mysteriousness and unpredictability of her imagery, she achieves a balance beyond the mere application of color. The left half of Crawlers 3 is essentially vertical and pulls leftward, an uneven pyramid that appears to rise from a tapering, distant tail. The right half, denser and less given to contrast, is more horizontally shaped and tugs in the opposite direction. Turmoil, confusion, entanglement, the indecipherability of organic matter — all contribute to the artist’s vision. And though the monumental compactness of her images couldn’t be called playful (play requires air), the energy of her shapes also precludes somberness or foreboding.
Not all of “Crawlers” boasts the explosive, almost lewd edginess of Crawlers 3. In two groups that go by the title Nightcrawlers, the coils are elongated but, with one exception, significantly reduced in number, and their rippling black bands belong to unpopulated background washes of muted color, gray blue or maple brown. They’re like imaginary landscapes. In most of Nightcrawlers, the cylindrical forms appear large in the foreground and diminish in size in the upper half of the picture plane with resulting intimations of perspective, a zany takeoff on ancient Chinese scroll painting, vistas of muted hues punctuated by precise, recurrent silhouettes. The mood is meditative, vaguely celebratory. Given greater space, Ainslie’s ostensible worms become the land itself, wiry drumlins, slowed down in speed to the pace of the earth.
