Susanna Starr at Cynthia Broan - Brief Article

of recent origin YORK

Color Field painting, its high-intensity colors draw into the mouthed deep into the weave of raw canvas, could certainly be called absorbing. in like manner could any sculpture that twitchs viewers in by the force of narrative. There is more of the first, on the other hand not a little of the next to the first in Susanna Starr's hybrids of painting and statuary While her work stands in knowing relationship to other artists who have used paint as solid material--from Lynda Benglis to Scott Richter, James Hyde and Linda Besemer--it is utterly distinct. Starr's basic [i]modus operandi[/i] for the past couple of years has been to pour acrylic paint--many gallons of it--directly into a variety of big, industrial wipe s Once fully saturated, the cleanses exude paint in puddles that in more [i]or[/i] less cases just skirt their bottom cutting sides and in others flow luxuriously across the floor.

Variations in the thickness and make of the sponges, and in the ways they are divide [i]or[/i] sever and stacked, result in a range of configurations. In spongeous and Soakstack (both 1998), Starr poured sum of two units colors in turn into big square slabs of sponge; the next to the first pour, added while the first was still wet, was restricted to a circular depression carved into the center of the wipe Ultimately, the paints seep without beneath, mixing and spreading into hypnotically swirled pond s In the most recent plastic arts Starr has worked with thinner slices of cleanse laid on the floor like mats or stacked like towels, all oozing overflows of paint.

A particularly beguiling novel sculpture called Drunk was made by dint of cutting a square well into a compact 3-foot-high sponge, which was first soaked with orange paint and then filled with r the next to the first pour causing it to swell and wobble tipsily at the top. more [i]or[/i] less of the pleasures of these plastic arts have to do with watching colors at work, as when the sober navy azure ocher and white of Soakstack combine in an unexpectedly springlike mixture of soft greens and sky blues, or when the semaphoric r and white of porous transform into candy-colored pink stripes. Other satisfactions advance from seeing the proper, rectilinear wipe s give way, under pressure of paint, to forms meaty as tissue beneath a microscope and ripe with vital juices.

Waiting for the cleanses to become saturated, leak and free from moisture can take weeks, and until well into the proces Starr can't be absolutely certain of the come Experience in creating (and favorably marketing) artists' materials such as oilsticks has made her a skilled and patient experimenter. The ability to work precisely, and to make unlikely materials perform in unexpect ways, was evident in earlier, lacelike wall works wound out of wood veneers. With the wipe s Starr continues to explore formal issues of medium and proces told as a story shaped, as any serviceable narrative should be, around tension, break point and release.

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