MHC Art Museum Hosts Chromaform

Museum Director Marianne Doezema says the museum is hosting Chromaform because "we're interested in sculpture shows, but they're relatively rare because sculpture is so awkward to handle." Doezema says that when she showed the proposal for Chromaform to sculpture professor Joe Smith, he was excited about the list of artists and felt that Chromaform would offer students a chance to spend significant time with work that they would otherwise have to go to New York City to see.

As curator Frances Colpitt writes in her catalogue essay, "the sculptures in Chromaform: Color in Sculpture are not merely colored but of and about color as much as they are about materials and space, the more traditional concerns of sculptors." In many cultures, she notes, polychrome sculpture has been the norm, but in most periods of Western art it has been the exception. This rejection of color in sculpture, Colpitt contends, "stems from the Western predilection for purity." She cites as one example the twentieth-century sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who called for truth to materials--for allowing materials to remain in their "natural" state, without the application of color.

Things changed in the 1960s, when color burst upon the sculpture scene in the works of Minimalists like Donald Judd, who had his pieces fabricated from such nontraditional materials as fluorescent Plexiglas and color-anodized aluminum. Colpitt notes that "Judd's example and his crusade for the acceptance of color in sculpture are crucial to the developments of the 1990s." She sees his influence in the work of Chromaform sculptor John McCracken, who envelops planks of wood in fiberglass, covers them with pigmented resin, and finally sands and polishes them to a smooth, shiny finish. Another Chromaform participant, New York sculptor Lillian Ball, also treats color itself as a raw material. Her pigmented silicone-rubber sculptures are made by casting the hollow spaces of common household forms, such as bathroom-sink basins.

Several of the sculptors in Chromaform construct their work from mass-produced domestic objects. Chris Finley of Peengrove, California, splashes together the pastel colors of shower-curtain rings, Tupperware tubs, flower pots, and other quotidian plastic stuff in quirky, playful assemblages that viewers are free to take apart and reconfigure. Brooklyn resident Jessica Stockholder began her career as a painter; not surprisingly, her wall-mounted sculptures combining brightly colored storage crates, wire mesh, yarn, and plastic fruit recall still-life paintings. The color orange gets an enthusiastic thumbs-up from Melanie Smith, a British artist now living in Mexico City, in her wall-mounted juxtapositions of everything and anything that's made of orange plastic.

Thematically and stylistically, the work in Chromaform reflects the diversity of the contemporary art world, in which no single style or movement holds sway. Strains of Pop art can be discerned in Los Angeles artist George Stoll's replicas of Tupperware and rolls of toilet paper. And echoes of Minimalism turn up not only in McCracken's planks but also in the quiet, elegant work of Chicagoan Richard Rezac, whose painted-wood abstractions recall the forms of architecture and furniture.

Chromaform: Color in Sculpture will be on view at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum from April 8 through May 28, 2000. On Thursday, April 13, at 4:30 pm, award-winning sculptor and Chromaform participant Lillian Ball will give a talk titled "The Virtual Life of Sculpture: Computer Animation and Installation" in Gamble Auditorium. An opening reception will follow from 5:30 to 7:00 pm.

 

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