How You Like It - at Buffalo Arts Studio |
by Kevin Thurston |
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Walking into the gallery space at Buffalo Arts Studio you are immediately hit with Amanda Wojick’s best drawing, “Big Orange Band-Aid Drawing.” The strength of this work captures her project at its best: a mixture of both fine art and everyday materials used to create landscapes ripe with unnatural colors (fire-engine red and other fluorescents abound). At first you notice many colored, striped ink markings suggesting worms and/or night crawlers, but then after stepping back, the Band-Aids actually begin to create an archipelago coming into the frame from the lower left-hand side. She judiciously, and perhaps unnecessarily, brings the point home with ink work taking the shape of exaggerated cattails and other swamp grasses, primarily placing them along the upper-left perimeter of the archipelago.
Indeed, with these works Wojick is focused exclusively on the landscape. And if, in her effort to create “hidden worlds,” she seems to have perhaps skimped on the quality of craftsmanship, it would be understandable; she has had quite a prolific year. (Thirteen of the exhibit’s 16 works are from 2005.) For example, in the work “Blue Cliff,” which adorns the far wall of the gallery, she gives us a whimsical world that suggests mermaids, and a curiosity as to what is inside this work coming out of the wall. Yet, upon closer inspection, the paint chips that obsessively coat many of the works of the show are not applied across the entire surface. Seeing the foam underneath is akin to finding out that Santa Claus can’t be dead because he never even existed. Instantly you’re drawn to the artifice of the work, but in all the wrong ways. If there is one criticism of Wojick’s show it is that her work always seems to stop short of offering up something beyond itself.
If Wojick’s work stops short of offering up something beyond itself, Sandra Rechico’s installation is an offering. Made with human labor, Rechico’s work does not seem as cold or conceptual as many viewers may initially feel upon walking into a world that is not hidden, but rather underlined. With yards of yarn hanging over various objects in Buffalo Arts Studio’s ceiling (she uses white yarn for the fire extinguishing system; gray for the roof drainage piping), Rechico has created a different map of what is otherwise a plain mixed-zoning room. When walking through the various sub-zones, or rooms within rooms, viewers get to experience a newly defined space. If the space is the macro, closer inspection provides the individual nature of not only the crocheted yarn tubes (which were fabricated prior to any of Rechico’s volunteers working on it) but of the manipulations at an individual level (some people have added knots, others left theirs looser, others tighter). By combining these two elements of the installation, what Rechico has in fact created is a map of community—a topographical assault on a room that can only be accomplished through the assistance of others.
It is to the credit of Rebecca Moda, Exhibition Coordinator, that the unique tension has been displayed between these two artists, both of whom explore the world—one how she would like to see it, the other as it is lived. The exhibitions continue through October 29.
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