Jane Bruce, Ghost House, 2008,kilnformed and coldworked glass, Caithness stone,11.625 x 11.625 x 7 inches
Jane Bruce's show of kiln-formed glass pieces at Bullseye Gallery, "Contained Abstraction," initially seems like an odd pairing of two dissimilar sets of work: one colorful and animated, the other still and ghostly. Once the works are viewed up close, however, the disparity doesn't seem to matter or seem so wide.
Whether Bruce is showing her playful or somber side, she reduces our most familiar shapes and objects to their simplest essence. And given their transparency, these thick, dense glass sculptures are ideal for absorbing, reflecting and transforming light.
One set of Bruce's works are shaped like different household containers: a vase, bowl and bottle. They are presented in triptych-like trios together, with bright primary colors and angular forms that convey a constant set of motion. The blend of color and whimsy recalls the silhouette shapes of local sculptor Mel Katz or Henri Matisse's "Jazz" prints of 1947.
The other half of Bruce's show is devoted to glass sculptures of simple house facades, usually in simple black or white shades. Here, Bruce was influenced by ruins of abandoned homes dotting the rural Scottish landscape. Her boxy architectural forms, each growing thinner at the pitched-roof top with a chimney and two small windows in the center, convey a stillness and a lack of life, just as the artist's flashy vase, bottle and bowl trios embrace its vivacious opposite.
The house sculptures, such as "Ghost House" and "Empty House II," at first appear more successful than the colored vessels because they suggest something personal. Also, given the ubiquity today of colorful kitchen items found at retailers such as Target or even the multitude of stores with 99-cent items, Bruce's brightly hued household vessels seem less unusual.
However, the real key to these works is the material and Bruce's subtlety in using it. Kiln-formed glass is a departure for this English-born, New York-based artist. She has more frequently worked with blown glass, which offers greater flexibility and lightness. The kiln-formed material is denser, yet still clear enough that light can pass through and illuminate the pieces from within. The playful multi-colored vase-bottle-bowl triptychs seem like popsicles, with thousands of tiny bubbles frozen in place. Other portions of Bruce's work, particularly the house facades, are about a more cinematic sense of light and shadow.
Each work is accompanied by a series of drawings and paintings that Bruce made as studies for the sculptures. Starkly contrasting stencil-like silhouettes denote the simple forms as if they've been worked out as ideas on paper before heading to the kiln. They are either painted with watercolor in pairing with the base-pitcher-bowl sculptures, or drawn with charcoal for the house-shaped works. The drawings "White House (Middle Distance)" and "White House (Far Distance)" have the clarity of a Saul Bass-designed movie poster from the 1950s. Yet, here, too, the textures Bruce creates from paint and charcoal stand out with their broad fields of color or shading.
The colors may come or go and the shapes may change, but Bruce will hopefully continue whittling down forms and objects in a way that reveals and enlivens.
Bullseye Gallery, 300 N.W. 13th Ave.; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; closes May 17
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Download: Jane Bruce May 7, 2008