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A STRIKING APPARITION: Bruce Chao’s Aether [2003].

Bruce Chao is traversing a 100-foot-long path of ludicrously narrow wooden girders that he’s lashed into tree branches 50 above a forest floor. In the video, he wears a crash helmet and climbing harness and is roped in, but when a breeze rustles through the leaves and the trees shiver, my heart is in my throat. I’m not scared of heights, but I get scared watching other people at heights.
 
Chao’s work — part sculpture, part Project Adventure stunt — is the highlight of the five-person exhibit “Natured Anew: Reflections of the Natural World,” at Brown University’s Bell Gallery, organized by director Jo-Ann Conklin.

The Providence artist, who heads RISD’s glass department, has been erecting sculptures high up in the canopy of a private forest in Seekonk, Massachusetts, for six years, but this is the first exhibit of the work. Beechwalk (2002) is a zigzag catwalk of wood planks installed 25 feet up in the trees. In a photo, Chao stands atop a plank running among autumn leaves. His work taps the feeling of treetops as magical places where gravity pulls a bit less, landscapes for dreaming, the secret abode of elves and Ewoks. This wondrous spell is seasoned by subtle echoes of hunting blinds, with their evocations of surveillance and menace.
 
Some works are striking apparitions. For Aether (2003), he wove tree branches to create a hollow cocoon-basket slung between two trunks near the crown of an oak. It appears massive but fragile, like a giant bubble snagged in the tree. For Phantom Limb (2006), he cut a dead branch from an oak and replaced it with a matching branch of plastic pipe. The amputated limb and a second plastic-pipe copy are hung by wires from the gallery ceiling. Chao’s pipes uncannily mimic the natural form. The forest installation, as seen in a photo, feels tender and vulnerable, like a cast for a broken arm.
 
Many artists work the territory of organic abstraction, but Chao’s art is energized by moving outside the hermitic art-industrial complex. There are occasional missteps — Crotches (2004), a bunch of silver foam triangles stuck into the crotches of branches, looks like icky litter — but so far he’s managed to steer clear of major pitfalls like macho posturing, New Age treacle, and the caviler ecological destruction of much ’70s land art. It’s as if Chao is collaborating with the trees in a part-natural, part-handmade improvisation. The tension between his will and the forest’s will creates sparks. The result is some of the best contemporary art seen in the region this year.
 
Also exhibited are Barbara Takenaga’s dazzling abstract paintings of swirling dots resembling pinwheeling galaxies. Takenaga, who splits her time between New York and Williamstown, Massachusetts, makes her patterns seem to spin and fold in on themselves with simple but marvelous perspective tricks; in particular, the shapes grow larger and darker the farther they sit from the center of the paintings.
 

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