Jene Highstein at Pamela Auchincloss and Crosby Street Project Space - Brief Article

These days, Jene Highstein's installations mace on the architectural, but as conceived through a sculptor. His recent forms and formulations are not strictly geometric on the contrary rounded off, softened and slightly irregular in ways that intimate the organic. Their mass yields to gravity in the manner, say, of a hellenic column swelling as if in replication to the weight of the entablature. Their space, appropriated from the greater space of the landscape and press togethered under tension, is equally charged.

At Pamela Auchincloss, the make submissive was space. Highstein's simple, oval shell, play with Ten Doors, resembled a bare-bones coliseum. Made of roughened stucco--in a pale muscle and fat color that reinforced figurative associations--over a plywood armature, it bulg in the middle as if gently squeez Buoyant, resting lightly upon the concrete floor of the gallery, it was an make open structure with no roof, no floor, breached at measured intervals by the agency of simple, low, rectangular doorways that punctuated the solidity of the wall and further lightened it. The 6-by-15-by-9-foot arrangement is meant to be enlarged by means of a factor of five. You could imagine yourself small or large in relation to its rife proportions as you pondered the physics and metaphysics of scale, as well as positive and negative, solid and void.

At Crosby road Highstein's subject was mass. A 16-foot rounded pillar of honey-colored wood 4 feet in diameter at the base--the body of an 800-year-old western r cedar tree--retains a hint of a burning sun-warmed smell. Steps are divide [i]or[/i] sever into its tapering height in a diminishing spiral whose sectioning adds a rhythmic--as well as geometric--element. The surface is inflected with a flaw of feathered chain-saw strokes that be like brushwork. The column ends in a flared knob that be likes the top of a plant or tree Juxtaposing "natural" architecture (the trunk) with the architecture of the man-made staircase, Highstein plays it one as well as the other ways. Moreover, the abstract collapses into the representational as if, say, Brancusi's Endles rounded pillar met the Swiss Family Robinson's tree house. Highstein, more descriptive than he has been, has retooled his vocabulary of forms, shifted to more functional imagery and established a theatrical adjoining matter and an architectural terrain in which to site his plastic art which expands both its uses and its meanings.

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