ILLUSORY SPHERE ‘Charge 2,’ by John Bisbee. |
The similarities between Lauren Fensterstock and John Bisbee are manifold. Both are art faculty at prestigious Maine colleges. They're among the vanguard of the Maine contemporary art scene. The materials they use — Fensterstock with her paper gardens and charcoal, Bisbee with his sculpted nails — are uniformly dark, and at their best, both can manipulate those materials well beyond their typical associations. The immaculate fronds and ribbons of Fensterstock's precision-cut paper defy their feminine trappings when built exclusively in black, and Bisbee with his nails reworks a cold hard language — itself a masculine loner trope — into something fit for domesticity. For some, this may be the bleakest show at Aucocisco yet; it's also among the most brilliant composite showcases the gallery's ever had.Of course, brilliance is a relative term. Another trait the artists share is their painstaking and methodical approach to their own labors. The shine and burnish of these works would belie their weight without Fensterstock's obsessive sylvan detail or Bisbee's unremitting depth of blacksmithy. Without a work ethic that matches their conceptual aims, these artists wouldn't be nearly as interesting.
Fensterstock's dark gardens were last seen around here at a summer-long exhibit at the Ogunquit Museum of Art. At Aucocisco, she reprises them in "Third Nature," a series inspired by a black mirror-glass invented by a 17th-century baroque painter. Where the Ogunquit gardens were shown in botanical plots on the gallery floor, here they're encased in large mounted panels and beset with black-tinted glass, which gives them a rococo, ornamental quality not shared with her other works. One of the primary effects is the mirrored glass, which obscures and seems to ossify what it contains while vividly offering your own reflection back to you. Second is the work's obvious associations with the macabre: each panel contains a foundation of charcoal from which the black flowers protrude, casting a grim, funerary pitch.
To reiterate, one of the deep similarities these artists share is the degree to which their own process informs their work. It's ironic then that through the result of those processes lies one of their greatest distinctions. Look closer at Fensterstock's work — cold, monochrome, and reflective from afar — and you'll see detail that only a human hand could produce. The act of cutting paper into representational forms — surely something we all remember from adolescence — has a distinct personal history to it, one we have little difficulty imagining the artist (and thus ourselves) undertaking. Fensterstock doesn't usually leave many emotional inroads, but this is certainly one.
A closer inspection of John Bisbee's work, on the other hand, brings us away from the human and toward to the mechanical process. Of course, his is as much a hand-performed process as Fensterstock's, but humans have a different history with nails and spikes than they do paper, and so we treat them with a much more careful logic. It's difficult to disassociate his works with violence, and his work is less interesting should you try; the arduous process by which Bisbee hammers, bends, and welds his nails to adhere to his conceptual orders might itself be read as a sort of allegory of civilization. Each of Bisbee's creations here follow a unique system, stripping the nail of its thornier possibilities and fixing it to an intelligent design. "Coil" (34 by 45 inches) arranges them in a welded pattern of laurels, their heads curled like boughs into the negative space at the center. "Eddy" (34 by 45 inches) finds them in no discernible pattern, twisted and clustered in playfully decadent shapes. In "Wool" (30 by 43 inches), the spikes are long, distressed, and untwisted, obediently forming a textilish loom.
