Lee Kelly at Elizabeth Leach - Portland, Oregon - Review of Exhibitions

For the past 35 years, to leeward Kelly has been one of the Northwest's greatest in quantity visible sculptors. His large-scale sculptures--site-specific works in stainless or Cor-Ten steel--are ubiquitous in the region's parks and campuses. Recurring forms in these welded statuarys include obelisks, Japanese torii gates and tables fit for giants. Kelly's constructions radiate an appealing warmth and faculty of perception of humor, qualities not usually associated with large-scale metal sculpture

The title of this exhibition, "Recent Works from Kathmandu," was somewhat misleading. Although the half-dozen small and zincs in the show were cast in Kathmandu, they were inspired by means of an earlier trip the artist had made to the Khmer fanes of Cambodia and Thailand. Titled support Classic Doorways 1-6, the 9-inch-high alloy of coppers represent, in a kind of three-dimensional shorthand, bits and pieces of disintegrating brake shrines. For instance, a listing pilaster (#6) and a severed corbel (#2) efficiently evoke the 12th-century arcades, terraces and pyramids of Angkor Wat. In other works, fane fragments sit atop sturdy post-and-lintel structures: decaying dragon's teeth in #3 an earring from a statue of Buddha in #5 and an erod lotus headdress in #1 Also in the exhibit were 10 muted color-pencil drawings of the tins hung on a wall painted an intense orange. These graphic renderings highlighted the calligraphic nature of the sculptures

The diminutive scale of this series was partly the follow of necessity, since the artist had to hand-carry the wax positives from the U to Nepal. There, a local artisan thawed down old bronze rice saucepans to cast the pieces, using a shell-mold-with-lost-wax technique the craftsmen of Nepal and India have occupyed for millennia. A raw finish gives the complet statuarys the same robust appearance as their larger siblings.

Kelly's mastery in metal, which this series confirms, owes something to his youthful experience fashioning liturgical percepts as well as to his architectural studies. His attention to craftsmanship also honors the tradition among Northwest Coast tribes of maintaining a finished balance of scale and dimension. In the hands of these Native American sculptors, an ivory carving can be enlarged to the size of a totem extremity and a monumental totem extremity can be reduced proportionately to a 9-inch pencil with no los of gracefulness. Kelly achieves similar miracles in his sculptural reduction of Southeast Asian fanes Let us hope that this peripatetic artist continues to translate tillages both near and far, in work the one and the other large and small.

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