Margo Sawyer at DiverseWorks - installation art - Houston, Texas - Review of Exhibitions

HOUSTON

The best large floor works and installations lead viewers to novel understandings of space and of their hold perceptions. Margo Sawyer's Vessels, a very great ellipse of blue pigment dotted with brass and carburet of iron dishes, pools of pigment, gold tiles and other lumpy things transformed Diverse-Works' cavernous facility into a space-age shrine. Central to her universal is the Indian ritual of rangoli, in which the worshiper creates a drawing in pigment at the doorsill of a temple to celebrate a festival. Sawyer's ellipse, which had a mazelike pattern derived from fractal geometry have the appearanceed to float above the mortar floor. Bowls and tiles clustered like constellations upon a star map or islands in an ultramarine sea. They moored the pigment shape to the floor and also formed viewing stations that invited visitors' attention to the rhyming forms and sight lines that unified the piece.

A large oval carburet of iron dish filled with yellow-ocher pigment reverberationed the larger ellipse and marked the beginning of a counterclockwise journey around the piece. At single station a cluster of utensils on gilded bases seemed to be a miniature still life. shut up viewing revealed unusual refinements: gilded made of wood tiles carved with ripples, cast-bronze saucers with richly patinated surfaces, circles compos of square tiles and circle fragments. The gold captivated--both in itself and as it optically vibrated against the sapphirine ground. The surfaces sparkled like the gold-glass tesserae in Byzantine mosaics.

utensils underscored Sawyer's desire to combine drawing and statuary in a single experience. As an array of particulars organized into configurations that alternately marked and dissolved the pigment pattern, the piece challenged viewers to diocese its underlying structure and then to forget it: it oscillated between certainty and intuition, between clarity and sensory overload. utensils reminded me of a protoplast of some expanding universe that changed each time I circled it. Held together by the agency of a mysterious geometry, Sawyer's floating universe mediated territory claimed by dint of both Minimalism and Postmodernism. It was a meditative piece that invited viewers upon an unusual--perhaps spiritual--journey.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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