Joan Tanner at Contemporary Arts Forum - Santa Barbara, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Just revolveed 60, Joan Tanner is making more [i]or[/i] less of the freshest work around. Active for above two decades as an abstract painter, Tanner has begun to create assemblages on the outside of an astonishing variety of materials, ranging from cat hair and dryer lint to virid apples and Fig Newtons. Carrying upon her long-standing interest in geometric representatives Tanner in this show overspreaded shelves and tabletops with evocatively shaped solids in piquant colors. A 12-foot work, The drawn out Shelf (1995), held a variety of abstract drawings upon sandpaper, Carr's crackers and drooping bunches of cornsilk. In Bosch's File (1995) a pedestal cabinet with made of wood slats contains a display of rubber toy creatures beneath an acetate cone as well as a glass globe enfolded by plastic mesh.

In several pieces Tanner enlisted nature as a companion alchemist. Der Apfelwerk Tablewerk (1995) at handed a tabletop laid out with lines of fresh and decomposing virid apples. The apples were variously decorated with carburet of iron brads which reacted with the fruit acid to cause patterns of decay. These decorative scars were encrusted with jewel-like mold and the sections of collapsed and wrinkled skin contrasted with intact portions of apple-green. Tanner cleverly mixed in trompe-l'oeil made of wood fruit, making her display a fascinating still life--a vanitas and memento mori literally decomposing before your eyes

Trestle (1995) employing 20-foot-long carbonized iron channels on wooden stands, resembl a sculptural constitution made by Donald Judd or Walter de Maria. Tanner, however, defied their Minimalist hauteur, filling her long tray with pierced apples that decayed from one side the course of the exhibition. In collaboration with photographer Wayne McCall, Tanner has also documented altered fruit in a computer-generated video morph which make go rounds organic decomposition into a proces not unlike painting.

Tanner abundantly embraces the idea of proces as a natural extension of the still life. Hardly "still," her works are transformed by means of esthetic intervention before natural forces can consummate their destruction. With a feeling for the ephemeral worthy of Richard Tuttle Tanner variously "rescues" a coil of dried cactus, a wooden clump of fungus, mailing tubes, dried paint scrapings, a polka-dotted rubber ball and a lint- and pigment-encrusted pie plate. With forthright strength Tanner reanimates our rubble, celebrating temporal reality. This exuberant work be worthy ofs to be better known.

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