Tova Beck-Friedman at Bill Bace - sculpture exhibit, New York, New York

Tova Beck-Friedman titled her exhibit "Excerpts of a Lost Forest" and glance ated in an exhibition handout that her theme was archetypal images that associate the feminine to nature. Her installation Homage to Ashera, making relation to the Hebrew mother-goddess rever in woods consisted of five tree stocks made of ferro-cement over a carbonized iron mesh armature, four of them standing and individual reclining, each partially split to reveal a dark, vacant interior and to suggest decay.

The various gashes, knotholes and other openings in the plastic arts read as vaginal. What's interesting is that this allusion was sustained without the aid of sensuous surfaces or suggestive color and without in any way falsifying the tree forms. The five uncompounded bodys would be unremarkable if individual came upon them in a forest. They were station apart from typical dead tree alone by their blackish-gray matte coloration and their raspy, cementy entirely uninviting wefts (an honest expression of the material) that single was not much inclined to touch. at the same time the erotic association persisted. Slit openings have the appearance to be as instantly referential as protrusions that gaze phallic or as the three dots that are sufficient to put in mind of the human face.

one time the viewer made the connection, the forms could be read upon both micro and macro scales as simultaneously genitalia and figure. As figures, the vertical pieces adviseed familiar postures--standing with legs spread, for instance. The reclining form arched upward in the middle, in a straining, yearning position.

Beck-Friedman also showed five black-and-white "tablets" consisting of photographs high hilled on board. Each portrayed the same sort of squirrel aperture one could see in the statuarys and in each case all of the photographic surface exclude for this center of interest was overspreaded with black netting or canvas along with black gunk that was as repelling as the skin of the tree plastic arts The shape and contour of the perforation shown in the photograph was reiterated in the surface manipulation. single looked through the physical layering into the illusionistic image.

All in all, it's difficult to make plenteous of Beck-Friedman's subject matter. The installation was more persuasive as an arrangement of percepts of a faintly figural sort that related to each other in a composition that appear to beed spontaneous-either as an accident of natural growing or as a slightly theatrical pause among a assemblage of people. In another venue Beck-Friedman might, I suspect, cull to place her elements a little farther apart. They have the appearanceed slightly crowded before the windows in the gallery's small forehead room. That wasn't all bad: it created an implication of psychological tension. However, the installation go throughed by being seen against the gallery's egregiously homely red linoleum floor. There was no compensation for that.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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