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Art

Connect the blots

The work of sculptors of Carolina Sardi and Sandy Winters lets the viewer provide the context.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published January 12, 2006

[Images from Gulf Coast Museum of Art]

Carolina Sardi, Blood/Love,Blood/Love, 2005, painted steel.

	Sandy Winters, installation for “Pretexts and Subtexts,” 2004, mixed media.

LARGO - Metal sculpture usually capitalizes on its weighty qualities, formed by artists into dense presences. But in Carolina Sardi's hands, metal, though firmly clamped to walls, floats with ethereal unexpectedness.

The installations lining the walls at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art suggest groupings of oversized thumb tacks, which is not meant as a derogatory description.

Thumb tacks puncture and ground things, keeping a name or number before our eyes. Sardi's shiny, imperfect rounds, clustered in patterns, do as much for an idea. And like the shorthand information that real thumb tacks usually nail, these act as triggers for deeper connections.

Think about blood and the red cells coursing through our bodies, pumped with rhythmic precision by our hearts. Then think about love and the arrhythmic behavior it can inspire. Blood/Love suggests both with its arrangement of red metal discs bunched like so many clots. A few break away on an independent trajectory, thwarted or embraced (take your pick) by another close-knit bundle.

And consider green, also rife with contradictory associations. Forest could be a close-up, stylized depiction of a tree shedding its leaves. Or is it an aerial view of a grove, sliced, perhaps, by human intrusion? Poet Richard Wilbur wrote in The Beautiful Changes that "any greenness is deeper than anyone knows" and so we see in this conceptual, three-dimensional monochrome.

Yolks is a sunny-side-up grid of bright yellow discs, some painted with squiggles of black paint that could be the remnants of an undeveloped life we sometimes see when we crack open an egg. Or it could be the opposite, a phallic piercing and the beginning of a new life.

One gallery wall is hung with drawings that show us the artist's process of winnowing down a literal image into a conceptual essence. Blue is explored in the tonal nuances of a landscape, then rendered in uncompromising starkness on a white wall, moderated by an undulating arrangement that is as close as you get to a visual depiction of wind.

I wish I could be as enthusiastic about another series of Sardi's sculptures of angular bent steel that, like her wall installations, are more about void than mass. Home Sweet Home's pitched roof line and empty pegs resembling a coat rack seem heavy-handed and cliched. Cellular shapes, similar in conformation but painted as Sky and Earth, leave even less to the imagination.

Compare them to the spare beauty of Snow's dots that are a flurry frozen in time. Like their counterparts, no disc is exactly like another. The purity of their whiteness is blemished by a shadow version of the work created by down-lighting, more beautiful and true for the imperfection.

An entirely different sort of rumination on nature takes place a gallery away with Sandy Winters' fantastical constructs that owe as much to Dr. Seuss as to Claes Oldenburg. Winters creates an environment in which strangely imagined mechanical devices are attached to equally strange natural forms that resemble body parts. Maybe a more apt comparison would be the creatures resulting from a collaboration between Dr. Moreau and Robert Oppenheimer.

Some exist alone, painted or drawn on canvas or sheet metal. She takes over a gallery for a large installation that wraps around the walls and spills onto the floor. You can almost hear the burps and bangs were some invisible switch to be flipped. It's big, disturbing, messy. You come away wondering what it all means. That's life, I guess.

- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

"Carolina Sardi: Exquisite Tension" and "Sandy Winters: Pretexts and Subtexts" are at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, 12211 Walsingham Road, Largo, through Jan. 31. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5 adults, $4 seniors, $3 students and free for ages 10 and younger. (727) 718-6833.

[Last modified January 11, 2006, 10:48:18]