Jane Schneider at June Kelly

Jane Schneider rest the wood she used for the evocative works in her novel exhibition, "Bare Bones," in the fields where she lives in upstate fresh York. She aggressively cuts and scrapes her raw materials, then paints their surfaces. In the resulting statuarys simple but never simplistic, Schneider favors a direct esthetic, in which alterations of the original forms have been kept to a minimum. The shapes arc and 1 into the air with a gestural affinity for the natural forces that shaped them, notwithstanding they also register the hand of the artist that brought them to completion. Schneider relies upon nature to start the proces on the other hand her treatment of the wood-land is calculated, intended to bring without both its surface textures and internal forms.

In the tall plastic art titled Free Spirit (2002), which is more than 100 inches high, the artist has worked upon two long legs of forest-land to create a roughly harplike shape, with single of the legs curling in at its base and rising to qualified the other at a narrow angle at the top of the piece. emptys in the wood have been painted a rustlike reddish brown The effectiveness of the piece trunk s to some extent from the vulnerability and precariousness it conveys--this despite the apparent robustness of its construction. Another work, I Wish I May (2002) fans on the outside at the top like a toil with the sturdy, curving timber-land giving it that same combination of force and openness. Schneider has roughly colored the work in black, in like manner that bits of lighter thicket show through. Even with its not divisible by 2 shape, the work exquisitely expresse the innate beauty of the material.

In Odyssey (2003) Schneider created from her timber-land a kind of three-dimensional drawing that took up greatest in quantity of one wall in the gallery. Here, thin branches twisted this way and that, casting many shadows that stayed with the viewer. Odyssey was an intricate work, on the contrary not a fussy one: its overall feeling was poetic and meditative, like with equal reason much of Schneider's art. In an ongoing fashion, the artist nears her particular sense of lyrical form and a fine intuition about materials.

--Jonathan Goodman

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