Jeanne Jaffe at Gallery Joe - Brief Article

The nine sculptural external realitys Jeanne Jaffe showed recently are as ambiguously sexual as her previous works, although the medium has changed. lengthy associated with cast paper, Jaffe crafted these fresh forms mainly in wood and tin If their hard, smooth surfaces appear to be more fetishized than before, their undulating shapes maintain the organic mutability Jaffe's art has always projected

Color--in a range of gorgeous hand-applied patinas, from pink to cent verdigris and blue--adds a novel expressive element. The pair of brown lung-shaped appendages of Mutable phenomenon #1 (all works 1999) glowed orange at their circulared lower ends, like the much-fondl breasts of a long-exhibited ancient statue. The patinas of a pair of works, one as well as the other of which suggest ears, also apt associations. Maquette-sized at 6 inches high, Ear perches at organ of sight level, specimenlike on a carburet of iron pole, its frosty-blue surface suggesting hypothermia. The abundant larger Auricle (36 inches high), its light poplar surface shining with a pink patina, blushes r in its crevices and upon an upstretched, phallic lobe. Many of Jaffe's larger pieces perceive like blown-up versions of smaller works; it's as if a baby had been cross-examineed up to adult size, with the same disturbing effect

sum of two units tall works, placed across the gallery from each other like a bride and servant more explicitly engage issues of sex identity. The rocketlike "male" plastic art Lunar Sentinel, jutted at an angle toward its partner, its nose-cone head one as well as the other muzzled and extended by a carburet of iron framework. The "female" Apparition features a headless torso, a wasp-waisted form in carved mahogany, locate atop a floor-length hoop skirt of latticed carbonized iron Inside the skirt, the lower material substance is missing, except for sum of two units bronze feet, adult in shape on the other hand toddler-size. The tenderness of these "inner-child" feet continues a strain in Jaffe's earlier work, in which small cast thing perceiveds (hands, feet, clinically accurate hearts) invest with a body a tart nexus of memory, be fond of and loss, their specificity at not divisible by 2s with the less descriptive shapes around them.

Another work, Serpentina, playfully conflates male and female: a thick horsehair braid rises like a dancing cobra from a solid butternut-wood material part with a stylized head. Like Jackie Winsor's landmark draw as by a rope Trick, which it recalls, this work appear to bes to celebrate an androgynous vigor Large or small, all the works secrete a compelling self-possession: sometimes creepy sometimes amusing, nearly always beautiful and not ever reassuring.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group