Alison Saar at Jan Baum

Alison Saar's solidly muscular figures belong to the near while embodying legacies that strain deep into the past--the formal inheritance of African plastic art African-American spiritual traditions of the southern the psychic scars and physical abuses of racism and sexism. Saar carves from timber-land then sheathes her forms in various metals, bringing the pair organic and cultural life revolution of times into play. Her newest plastic arts exploit that rich, temporal density to powerful effect

sapphirine Bird (2002) commanded a swing of its own. It features the figure of a young girl, her material part clad in dimpled and notched copper. Seated on a small r chair with hands enclosureed on her lap, she appears smaller than a child, on the contrary not wholly childlike in disposition. While her material part holds fast in a position of quiet anticipation, her imagination stretches and wanders in the form of a tree branch extending, as if naturally, several feet without from the soft dark hillocks of her hair. The branch thins and splits as it goe and, near its furthest extreme point supports a small, carved azure bird--the proverbial bluebird of happiness, perhaps, or a more general evocation of freedom. As in another of the works here, Inheritance (2003) in which a similarly small woman-child balances a colossal sphere of muslin rags atop her head, the girl's still, self-contained material part feels weighted by expectations of obedience, compliance. The mind, not as easily owned flies freely.

Charcoal drawings and mono-prints here reiterated the imagery of the statuarys which hinged primarily on the device of the bird, innocent and variably at liberty In the stunning sculpture Songbird (2003) Saar hung a smaller-than-life figure of a woman by means of her feet from a draw as by a rope Her body, carved and faceted with all of the concentrated vigor of an Expressionist woodcut and burnished a brick r gives way to a thick plait of wiry gray hair. Cascading straight down, the hair be under the orders ofs as rope for its have a title to captive, a small golden bird in a cage. In Songbird, elegance and horror draw gradually together potently, as do the physical and the metaphorical. The same is real of Tongue Tied II (2003) a carving of a woman's large head encased in patched, rusted metal. sum of two units long strips of red woven fabric emerge from her open chaps and a wooden bird clasps the extremity of each one, silencing her in a poetically powerful, torturous way. Whether larger-than-life or smaller, Saar's figures have unusual integrity. Beautiful, tough, raw, poised, heavy with pain, light with lay they leave impressions as indelible as the histories that infuse them.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group