| The Boston Globe /Living|Arts |
| Thursday, September 18, 1997 |
| Arlene Shechet: celebrating the process of creating By Cate McQuaid |
Art objects are like bubbles of human experience – emotion, thought, and sweat crystallized into paint and plaster. Arlene Shechet’s work at the Bernard Toale Gallery is about that experience: the process of creating. The works are the end result of the act of making that took place when she slathered dollops of quick drying Hydrocal together with skins of dried acrylic paint to fashion Buddha heads and model temples in bright colors and crazy shapes.
Shechet follows the Buddhist principle of living fully, moment to moment, so her work is about the hands-on experience, not its resulting document. Her sculptures capture that principle both in their haphazard portrayal of time passing as the artist slops one layer over another, attempting to find form, and in their comedy. These works are confection -– “Madras Head” is a perky bust whose white surface mixes with yellow and green madras plaid. The pursuit of enlightenment is such a deadly serious business, we tend to forget what a crucial role levity plays in moving us in the right direction. Shechet reminds us.
As with her sculptures, Shechet’s drawings, from the “Mind Field” Series have layers that intermingle. She injects handmade paper pulp into sheets of acetate, drawing a diagram of mandalas and Buddhist temples (called stupas) with the cobalt-blue paper. Mandalas are in fact blue prints for the temple of the mind. Here the blue is so deep and vibrant you could fall into it. It bleeds into the acetate in nearly architectural diagrams, or maps to nirvana -– which is of cource here, now. |
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