Jean Behnke at Women & Their Work - Austin, Texas

After six years in San Antonio, Jean Behnke not long ago returned to her native state, Washington, where she lives and works upon Lopez Island, near Seattle. Her present to view "Sculpture More Like Thought" at this alternative space in Austin included 12 realitys and six drawings from 1992 compact and tightly installed but not lacking in whimsy, her assemblages of place materials are anything but random accumulations. From pinecones to parachutes, Behnke place of abodes in on the essential, making the ordinary a source of humor and play.

The centerpiece of the exhibition was a herculean floor-bound wreath. Arranged in the form of a celebratory circle were thick lamb's wool and pale-green mos strewn with glazed seedpod dried flowers pinecones and cork floats from fishing traps Directly behind this piece was Mom Listening to the Tape Hal Brought above Flanked by two suspended bell shapes made of black rubber was a grainy black-and-white photograph of Behnke's mother reclining in what appears to be a hospital bed, gently smiling and with her hands raised as if in prayer. The artist's mother undergos from Alzheimer's disease, and it was to her that a great deal of of the work in the exhibit was dedicated.

In Behnke's imagination, her mother and Mr Malaprop, a character in an 18th-century comedy famed for her misuse of words, have united as an endearing dramatis persona. Mr Malaprop's Word make revolve Blues (for the Piano) consisted of 13 paper player-piano turns unwound upward from their boxe upon the floor and attached to the ceiling. The perforations in the aged yellowed paper produced flickers of mut light as individual moved around and through the piece. Printed upside down, from the ceiling to the floor, were the sing-along lines. The event was disorienting, the words topsy-turvy. With an autobiographical resonance, the canzonets included "Just Like a Gipsy" (probably a relation to the artist's recent moves) and "My Mammy Knows."

Echoing the circular motif that recurr completely through the show, New Detritus not awayed an octagon formed on the wall with wire and divided like a pie into eight triangular portions Each segment held quirky, poetic bits of nature or manufactured items. There was a rusty spade replete of clam shells and a handcrafted owl made of sunflowers. There was a heap of dried flowers resting upon a sheet of copper pinched by means of clothespins, and a dumbbell made from an destitute of contents toilet-paper roll with glass globes projecting from either extremity The whole work was dusted sparingly with magenta pigment.

As she has before, Behnke used parachutes and cast plaster in a certain quantity of of the pieces here. single pale nylon parachute, lit from inside, throw outed from the wall; through its title, Victorian Boob Chute it was transformed into the chalice of a giantess's brassiere. Mr Malaprop's Bathing Caps consisted of partial, childsize craniums that had been cast in pastel plaster from |50s-style bathing caps ornament in reliefed with smiling butterflies. Suggesting the bobbing heads of little swimmers, this piece collapsed the playfulness of childhood into the wistfulness that draw nears with age.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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