condition:environ
Liz Surbeck Biddle, Ivy Dachman, Leila Daw, Barbara Grinell, Sue Hettmansperger, Martha Horvay, Claire Wolf Krantz, Mimi Oritsky, Julia Shepley, Crit Streed

February 3 – 28, 2004

Liz Surbeck Biddle, Ivy Dachman, Leila Daw, Barbara Grinell, Sue Hettmansperger, Martha Horvay, Claire Wolf Krantz, Mimi Oritsky, Julia Shepley, Crit Streed

Condition:environ brings together works that explore the forces and imagery of nature and the physical world from the multiple perspectives of the included artists. Some of the works exhibited directly represent elements of the natural world and reveal the artists’ interest in the nuances of the environments they observe and inhabit. Leila Daw’s maquettes and proposal boards for public work projects map New England terrains by presenting separated layers of information such as land contours, roads, watersheds and vegetation patterns. Barbara Grinell’s dreamlike scenes show the human figure in relationship to non-human forms. Martha Horvay’s acrylic paintings of interior domestic spaces create a formal architecture of informal sites. Claire Wolf Krantz layers photographic images of places in India with acrylic paint in a comment about how travel experiences are filtered through our consciousness. Mimi Oritsky’s abstract aerial landscapes explore the startling visual relationship between altitude and ground level, using paint to make her surfaces as topographical as her subject matter. Other works more abstractly refer to physical forces and phenomena by exploring light and volume, surface quality and mass. These works also show the artists’ interest in physicality through the use of the materials themselves. Liz Surbeck Biddle’s ceramic sculptures employ an organic palette and suggest primordial forms. Ivy Dachman’s paintings, using layered ground, color, wax and charcoal, begin and end with drawn shapes that form moving relationships across the plane. Sue Hettmansperger’s complex use of paint to create unfolding and shifting images reveals her interest in the relationship of humans to their environment, molecular organization, botany and the physics of space. Julia Shepley’s drawings and sculptures expose biological structures with raw power and beauty by using cast glass, sewn fiber, clay and resin to manipulate light and shadow. Crit Streed carefully follows the edges of lines in her drawings; through physical action an unplanned but distinctive language of shapes emerges.