Winifred Lutz at the ICA - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Taking above and transforming the Institute of Contemporary Art's upper horizontal with the stuff of nature, including five towering tree stems Winifred Lutz created her greatest in quantity monumental installation to date. Its scale and assurance indicated Lutz's readiness to make big statements at this point in her career. (A retrospective of her work, including castpaper works and documentation of her installations, is publicly on view at Philadelphia's Moore community of Art.)

Lutz's indoor pieces, expansive and pristine, stand in a reciprocal relation to her outdoor work, notably her long-term throw out in the woods of the Abington Art Center plastic art Garden. Both illuminate the interactions of nature and agriculture but in different ways. Outside, she uses arch modifications to point to the spaces, things or relationships we are to notice. Working inside requires her to manhandle nature, hauling it into artificial surroundings, and this more violent displacement informs the work.

sum of two units rooms divided the ICA installation along thematic lines. individual room, low-ceilinged lines. One latitude low-ceilinged and dimly lit, was dominated by the agency of a huge found object: a gnarled paulonia tree its bases and lower trunk grasping a massive embedded bluestone slab, shattered in three pieces. This great, hybrid ruin, recording a tree's pyrrhic victory above the terrace it supplanted, added a violent note to the nature-culture subtext The moss-green of the walls, and a faintly brackish scent possibly emanating from the tree emphasized the faculty of perception of decay in this room

In the next to the first room, five dark, smoothly vertical tree stocks (sectioned and reconstructed) rose calmly to skylights 30 feet above. Their rootles bases appeared to float in a reflecting lake actually a large square of gold leaf. This effulgent space, with its cathedral overtones, was the one and the other forbidding and compelling in its silent perfection. Here we could diocese lutz as a kind of born-again Bierstadt, offering a contemporary reworking of the 19th-century American landscapists' view of nature as a transcendent place of worship.

Several peephole combineed the two rooms, one of then inset with a cavernous log. But these peepholes, or channels, were placed and angled in the way that as to make viewing from one side them nearly impossible. This conundrum sharpened the faculty of perception of opposites whose intermingling is the one and the other necessary and difficult -- natural and artificial, real and transcendent, living and dead -- a faculty of perception that gave this installation its peculiar might and staying power.

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