It seems like a simple exercise you might give students: Get a bunch of plastic bottles, lots of thread, and make some art from it. It's the kind of assignment teachers give to get students thinking about sculptural form and structure. And usually the results feel like a dumb exercise.
But in "Summer Adjunct Faculty Exhibition: Two Sculptors and a Painter" at Rhode Island College's Bannister Gallery (600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence, through June 30), Jamey Morrill of Providence makes it work. His sculpture Larvae features green plastic bottles screwed together and then bound by webs of red thread to form recycled-junk crystals set right on the gallery floor. Gallery director James Montford places a mat on the ground to encourage you to get down at their level and study their forms.
In past sculptures, like a black inflatable tire covered with dozens of orange baby bottle nipples, Morrill has shown a knack for catchy, surreal combinations of mass-produced materials. Their simplicity can be mistaken as simplistic, but they stick in your mind.
Larvae isn't terrific, but it's catchy. Why? I'd say it's the colors — the red of the yarn versus the bottles' emerald green. They're chromatic opposites and the combo makes each pop, but especially the green. It's the green of Mountain Dew or ginger ale bottles, and it's radiant under the gallery spotlights. It's fun.
The exhibit, showcasing some of the school's art department faculty, also features Earnest Jolicoeur of Scituate and Michael Cochran of Norton, Massachusetts.
Cochran sculpts spare, often geometric forms, and covers them in gold. Vikalpa is a pair of pyramids twisting out from the wall. Svara resembles fragments of a trombone or shower pipes. Amitabha is like a giant gold wedding ring. Anhatha is a pair of simple trumpet cones mated end to end. Sakti suggests a stretched out model of a boat hull and keel. Cochran uses words from ancient languages as titles. Sakti, for example, is a Sanskrit word that can describe a Hindu female deity associated with creative power or fertility. You aren't necessarily supposed to recognize the worlds, but catch their ancient vibe.
Cochran's simple shapes are inspired by Eastern philosophy and the archeology of ancient cultures. The gold is meant to give them a sense of timelessness — though the combination of minimalism and glam gold recalls the 1980s, which is when he began plumbing this style. It seems somewhat precious, but Cochran is successful at finding forms that have a rightness about them. They feel sure of themselves, like they are just what they need to be.
Jolicoeur paints abstract images that seem like riffs on nature. Oil Between Us could be a cross-section of earth networked with rust brown caves or underwater rivers. H-Over seems like a tree abstracted into rectangles, stripes and ovals. Shoulder resembles an aerial view of a river delta in reds, pinks, violets, and whites.
Jolicoeur varies his paint from thin washes to juicy thickness; he gouges lines and gullies into his Formica-and-wood support. The paintings feel muddled though, lacking a certain snap. With abstraction, it's hard to nail down why. It's just a feeling.
Small collages of drawn and painted doodles suggest the source of Jolicoeur's painted compositions — cut-up recombinations of moments of fooling around that caught his eye. The playfulness of this approach seems like a good thing. And maybe that's what's getting somewhat lost as the compositions get firmed up for the paintings.
Read Greg's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.
