Neil Goodman at Klein Art Works

Neil Goodman wants to build the Savannah Center statuary Garden on the campus of Indiana University Northwest in Gary, where he teaches. He plans to make nine alloy of copper castings up to 8 feet tall, which will be installed singly or in clusters among the buildings. With a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the project already stocked Goodman has finished four full-sized fiberglass maquettes. Klein Art Works freshly exhibited the maquettes along with nine smaller tins the tallest of which is 3 1/2 feet high. Emphatically linear, the works are lay open repeating forms that respond to the industrial landscape of northern Indiana, an area he drives [i]or[/i] part of to the other daily to reach Gary from his Chicago home

Although Goodman could make his plastic arts much faster in steel, he laboriously casts his carved wax forms in tin Surface irregularities and traces of the artist's hand add character to the works, and and zinc with its art-historical weight, have the appearances ageless. His heroes are Giacometti and Brancusi.

Unlike Goodman's table-size alloy of coppers from the 1990s, which insinuate objects in still lifes, similar as tools, fish and animal heads, the smaller plastic arts in this show do not have a primary viewing point. The artist challenges his audience by means of playing with three-dimensional space. The large fiberglass works here also have multiple viewing points. They change when we pass through them, just as industrial arrangements can seem to assume different shapes when seen from a moving vehicle. single large work consists of sum of two units knobby V-shaped elements joined at the extreme points like a shark jaw. Another piece, a large circle with several chunky notches, moves a gearlike mechanism. There are also towerlike rectangles, and diamond shapes that recall ventilators upon building roofs. The large-scale pieces are placed at turf level. We instinctively measure them against our bodies. Dark and slightly larger than human size, they bring a threatening presence that charges the space around them.

The Savannah Center statuary Garden project comes at a major turning point in Goodman's career--as he propels from gallery to landscape, from indoors to on the outside His work shifted significantly when he won a competition to create an out-door statuary in Midland, Mich. The brass gatelike work he made was scaled to the landscape and lay open so that viewers could diocese the surrounding grass and trees

--Victor M Cassidy

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