KAREN WILKIN
431
If
in Shuebrook's richly inflected black-and-white universe, every–
thing, both past and present, is permanently interconnected, in Hewl–
ings's world things seem only momentarily held by some kind of force
field . Dissolution seems imminent; transience, like the constantly chang–
ing light of English weather, is the rule. Even though you know perfectly
well that Hewlings's constructions are held together by the thin metal
arcs and rods linking the deceptively casual clusters of wooden blocks
and bars, his sculptures seem weightless, almost airborne-or rather,
they would if they weren't suspended between quite literal tables or did–
n't cascade off of them. The tables are not bases, in the usual sense, but
instead are integral parts of the sculptures, yet the difference between the
two elements is important. In Hewlings's view, the tables "ground" the
sculptures by making it clear that his frail-appearing, gravity-defying
structures in fact have considerable weight. The tables also mediate
between the quotidian and the mysterious. As familiar, vernacular
objects, they obviously belong to the world of everyday things, yet,
because they have been co-opted to the realm of the artist's invention,
they make you ponder the difference between the comprehensible ways
ordinary things occupy the space you inhabit and the irrational ways art
impinges on your existence. The repetitive dimensions and insistent ver–
tical orientation of Shuebrook's drawings have a similar effect, forcing
you, once again, to take into account the difference between the given
and the made. Such connections are admittedly fortuitous. What most
strongly connects Shuebrook and Hewlings is their common probing of
the nature of modernism, their questioning of the present possibilities for
abstraction, although they obviously pose these questions from wholly
individual, if sympathetic, viewpoints. Yet the decision of the show's
curator, David Cohen, to show the two artists together makes even those
of us who've followed their work for some years think about them in
new ways.
It
will be interesting to see the ramifications of this meeting.
Also fortuitous was the brief overlap of
Making Space
with a paint–
ing exhibition by Jill Nathanson, who added yet another voice to this
discussion of the implications of geometry. For some years, Nathanson's
work has probed the contradictions implicit between the way particular
geometric configurations are traditionally interpreted as alluding to
space and the way modernist abstraction can detach those configura–
tions from illusionistic meaning. Nathanson's acute awareness of the
tension between Western painting's inherited codes for depicting space
and modernism's insistence on the fact of surface and the physicality of
materials provides the intellectual underpinnings of her work and gives
it rigor. What makes it seductive is her highly individual sense of color,
