ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — At the end of every
episode of “The A-Team,” Hannibal Smith, played by George Peppard, would
light his cigar and say, “I love it when a plan comes together.”
I
don’t know if gallery owner April Price and artists Jon Carver,
Marietta Patricia Leis, Edwina Hawley Milner and Mayumi Nishida lit one
up after finishing the installation of “Illuminexus,” a collaborative
exhibition, but they certainly earned a good smoke.
The show grew
out of a conversation between Leis and Price regarding the possibilities
of cross-pollination between Santa Fe and Albuquerque artists. The
result is a powerful show with a variety of divergent sensibilities
coming together with a surprising coherence of creative intent.
Though wildly different in some respects the four artists complement each other’s work.
“Ascension” by Marietta Patricia Leis.
The
largest and most complex piece is “Plenum” a multilayered mobile and
true collaboration between longtime New Mexico arts writer and artist
Carver and his wife, Nishida. The piece is made up of transparent and
translucent circular discs tied together with and hanging from clear
nylon fishing line.
Each painstakingly constructed and designed
acetate disc – ranging from 6 to 16 inches in diameter – is a unique
part of the whole narrative consisting of a range of silk screened and
hand-painted images, including cats, birds, furniture, mandalas and
small vignette-like scenes from a stage play. The piece has great street
cred, with its first 2013 iteration having been shown at Gallery Zone,
an artist-run art space in Japan.
Like Dan Aykroyd in
“Ghostbusters” who inappropriately thought of the Marshmallow Man at the
very wrong moment, my first thought on viewing “Plenum” from a distance
was Lawrence Welk’s champagne bubble intro.
It might not have
been a bad thought if Welk and his gaggle of songbirds, musicians and
accordion players could knock out a credible rendition of Igor
Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite” but they probably could not. So I
apologize to “Plenum” and its makers.
In “The Big Question,”
Carver has buried words that ask the viewer to consider the nature of
life. The high-energy composition is reminiscent of some Hindu stone
temples that are so elaborately embellished with carvings that they seem
to be melting in the sunlight and come close to turning into pure
sound.
“Nocturne in Glass” by Mayumi Nishida.
Nishida
offers an inverted silk-and-wood pyramid and several light-catching
panels that move and vibrate as the viewer passes by. My favorite among
those is “Nocturne in Glass” a deep-blue composition brimming with
geometric ghost forms.
Leis, the only Albuquerque artist in the
gang, is a perennial minimalist with a penchant for romantic ambiance.
While on an artist winter residency in Iceland, she had a love affair
with the all-pervasive darkness of winter.
During that winter,
Leis produced beautifully dark but not foreboding images titled the
“Ascension Series” that exude greenish-blue light from within.
Her
paintings’ light comes from deep within the composition as if filtered
through the densely poetic atmosphere of an Icelandic winter’s eve.
“Klimpt Collage” by Edwina Hawley Milner.
Without
having to lift her brush to canvas, Milner has had an enormous positive
impact on the arts of New Mexico through her involvement with the Women
in the Arts Museum in Washington, D.C., and her contributing efforts on
behalf of the New Mexico chapter of Women in the Arts.
She’s a
heck of a painter and collage artist on top of it all. Gustave Klimpt
and his unbridled celebration of Art Nouveau aesthetic tenets are an
unapologetic inspiration for Milner, who freely applies gold leaf to
large abstract compositions that heat up the gallery with bold hot
colors and mural scale diptych and triptych formats.
With titles
like “Pathway to Paradise,” “Dancing Round-a-bout” and “Passing
Crossroads,” Milner is an artist on the move. Her paintings are bold and
well-executed.
For a variety of reasons and changes in her life,
Milner’s newest series is titled “The Klimpt Collages” from which she
selected eight little honeys for this exhibit. My favorite is a young
lady in profile surrounded by flower blossoms. Though a collage the
piece retains a true painterly look and feeling.
This is a do not miss experience.
