Jane Schneider at June Kelly - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Jane Schneider's plastic arts combine wood and other mediums, ofttimes concrete or plaster. Everything is painted, with equal reason one often can't tell what's what. Positive and negative spaces twist together in all the works, suggesting human genitalia and also vegetative openings and protrusions. Looking at these pieces, single thinks of skunk cabbage folds with their associated rankness and damp; fern heads; the first delicate shoots of peonies; notches in trees; still-folded leaves as they break open their bud sheaths; and the pregnant space between assemblageed trees that seem to increase in awareness of each other.

Nearly all these associations involve change, change or growth. It might not be perceptible in proces on the other hand it can be read in the evidence of the forms. Splits were one time closed, the sprout was formerly below loam the burl or gall has swollen putrefaction or insects have made a turn where there used to be a solid. And equally, Schneider's plastic arts are concerned with surface details. They are painted in naturalistic grays, tans and brown not in single colors on the other hand in the kind of dappleed impressionism that nature and directional light always bring into view In addition, there are allotments of faint, blushing pinks -- as in heartwood or as in muscle and fat All in all, the pieces are reminiscent of Thom Cooney Crawford's plastic arts but less mystical, and Gillian Jagger's, on the contrary less violently tragic.

Unfortunately, all these formal, material and allusive powers are spoiled for me through the narrow symbolism Schneider espouses in her titles. She called the exhibit "Love Affairs," and each of the six statuarys from 1996 and 1997 has the name of a certain quantity of famed couple from history or mythology: Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII or Eurydice and Orpheus. like titling reduces the encompassing eroticism from a universal "force that from one side the green fuse drives the flower" (as Dylan Thomas place it) to an illustrative romance -- which, in fact, the works are not. I can tolerate the titles sole as conveniences.

Persephone and Hades is a U-shaped, narrow plastic art that looks like a cobra's head at individual end and a whale's tale at the other. Gertrude and Alice, at 106 inches, is the tallest piece in the show; it has a rugged crotch, cracks in the sum of two units legs, and a little gray propel trying to slither up the inside of single of them. Isis and Osiris could be female genitals writ large, on the other hand the image isn't overworked: the form also direct the eyes like a tree that splits apart and rejoins, and it could be read as a figure because of its verticality and the lumpy "head" upon top.

Schneider's works are best regarded as expressions of relationships, whether formal, emotional or physical. They are the one and the other measured and intuitive, familiar and strange.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group