(Host) Commentator Tom Slayton has a review of “Being in Place,” an art exhibition currently being shown at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe.
(Slayton) Three Vermont artists take three different approaches to landscapes in the show “Being in Place,” now on exhibition at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe.
The participating artists are Claire Van Vliet of Newark, Eric Aho of Saxtons River, and Kathryn Lipke of Belvedere. All three offer subjective, non-traditional explorations of the landscapes that are their subjects.
Van Vliet’s large lithographs are powerful explorations in black and white of rocks and coastlines. Though contemporary in their dramatic impact – those big bold areas of deep black and bright white contain fascinating abstract compositions – a classical sense of form underlies her works.
Her large print entitled “Kata Tjuta” depicts a famous monolith in central Australia, and, whether one has been to Australia or not, it’s easy to sense the energy emanating from these dark, textured masses with white rivulets of water cascading down, defining the curving form of the immense rock.
The interlocking forms of rock and water and sky offer an almost Taoist sense of nature’s inherent, balanced power.
A lighter, more bravura piece is the 1997 vitreograph by Van Vliet entitled “Exposed Reef.” This stunning print, an essay in black, white, and textured gray, depicts coastal rocks infiltrated by narrow rivulets of sea water. Again, it is both naturalistic and striking as an abstract composition.
Eric Aho’s large painted landscapes in this show could almost as well be called skyscapes; the sky dominates four fifths or more of each painting, which nominally depict different places – Melrose, Massachusetts, a shoreline city on the Baltic Sea, the North Atlantic. In fact, the primary subject in each painting is the sky. They are primarily skyscapes, cloudscapes.
The sky overpowers the tiny strips of land and emphasizes the universality of all earthly places, which share the natural world, the wind, the water and weather.
The most overtly intellectual works in the show are those by Kathryn Lipke, who has constructed several ribbed kayak-like pointed-ellipse shapes of wood, canvas and lacquer. They are clearly hand-built yet refer to organic, natural shapes such as seedpods. She has assembled them with collections of other items – videos of natural places, collections of stones and vials of water from various sources.
Ultimately, Lipke’s intellectually complex constructions are impressive but less effective than the simple beauty of the vessel/seedpod shapes themselves. Perhaps the most striking of her sculptures is the smallest and simplest, entitled “The Journey,” in which a small version of the vessel shape is hung suspended over a wooden box filled with live, growing grass.
It offers a moving, resonant moment, filled with associations. Just one of many such moments in this fine show, “Being in Place,” at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe, through August 31.
This is Tom Slayton in Montpelier.
Tom Slayton is the editor of Vermont Life magazine. He spoke to us from our stdio in Montpelier.