It’s time to hurry: Pro Proscenia is closing this weekend at Joan Gallery. Curated by Jeanne Dreskin, the three solo artists – Walter Askin, Sandra Vista, and Elizabeth Bain – each convey a beautiful and unique sensibility.
The works on display are retrospective in nature, spanning the time period from the 1970s to the early 90s. Highly detailed and vibrant in palette, the works each manipulate space and surface, crossing the line between painting, sculpture, collage, and drawing. The dimensionality of each work engages viewers, and represents beautifully rendered techniques that call into question both time and space.
Askin in particular looks at time – as a line to be followed in a hopscotch fashion. Working with cultural images taken from a random series of historical times, he combines artifacts and figures, shaping worlds that shift beyond the natural realm into that of the highly theatrical. They glow and shift, a lovely transitional element in inherent in his body of work.
Bain looks at a world of night landscapes and urban geometry, creating evocative abstract images that revel in a world that is staged – or perhaps as Shakespeare put it succinctly, all the world IS a stage to her. She shifts horizons into stage curtains, cityscape into facade. We are an audience not the performers in her precise landscape.
She uses shapes as metaphors for more detailed images, and her palette is that of a city after dark, her images as a kind of wordless signage.
Vista’s work uses a wonderfully rich, highly feminist series of techniques and images, touching on the Pattern and Decoration movement that originated in the 70s and 80s while reimagining the ideals and images behind it with layered, tactile works that feel rich and deep.
Her images resemble quilts and tapestries, dancing with color and texture.
In the work of all three artists, we get a sense of artistry and artifice, of subtle meaning and refined motion.
We see stylized figures, familiar yet reimagined shapes, and layered, fabric-like patterns. It is in these ways that the artists – and the viewer through them – makes sense of the world, or rather, changes the sensibility of world.
This is a fascinating show, with both a sense of history and a timeless luster, a performance well worth taking in.
- Genie Davis; Photos provided by the gallery