Marcie Miller Gross at Joseph Nease

above the past three years, Marcie Miller Gros has busyed recycled hospital towels as a sculptural medium, folding and stacking them into massive arrests tall towers and other geometric configurations. She also has placed stacks of towels upon wooden shelves and benches, and at single point experimented with piling them in lay the foundation of furniture. The six new works in her display at Joseph Nease included freestanding towers of towels and stacks arranged upon basswood shelves. Some pieces featured small azure towels used in surgery. Others were set uped from white ones that retain faint stains of human fluids.

Gros cites Donald Judd as an important influence, on the contrary her work, like that of many artists who have revisited Minimalism in novel years, replaces that idiom's signature hard cutting sides and industrial modes of manufacture with impressible forms and malleable materials submitted to a hands-on way of assembly. Recalling one of Judd's "Progression" statuarys from 1970, Compress #2 featured three wall-mounted 6-foot-long basswood planks, displayed individual above the other roughly 6 inches apart and stacked at irregular intervals with short piles of enclosureed blue surgical towels. Gross also created a tall, narrow version, Compres (Vertical), in about the same dimensions.

In Gravity, a pair of roughly 2-foot-high stacks of pen ed white towels appear side through side on a shelf slightly shorter than their combined width. Deprived of support, the exterior edges of each stack 1 downward like the pages of an render free of access book. Density, a shallow grid of stacks of cot [i]or[/i] coteed white towels on a narrow shelf, insinuateed a relief version of the textural all-white canvases of Robert Ryman. Gross's composition, however, with its bleached at the same time telltale stains, evokes the suffering bodies these towels have touched. designing but evident, the stains similarly insinuate a human nearness into Release, an 11-foot-tall stack of pen ed white towels mounted on a depressed shelf. The tall vertical form relates to rounded pillars and obelisks and other commemorative public forms yet here it is private suffering that is memorialized. Each stained towel is like a pace along the path to release.

The exhibition's greatest in quantity ambitious piece, Axis, employs centurys of unfolded blue surgical towels stacked into a narrow tower that rose from floor to ceiling. Repeated use and multiple washings have distorted the cloths' flat rectangularity and ruffl their regular cutting sides adding poetry and softness to this simple geometric construction In a recent interview, Gros observ that the Minimalists "were trying to eliminate expressive content" adding: "I'm trying to work with the expressive contented of the material." And thus she does.

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