A SCULPTOR AT LARGE: Working with the “stuff of the earth,” this artist –teacher creates objects that amaze and provoke.

The concepts for her sculpture, Celeste Roberge explains, “begin with seeing something in the world—like a rock, a sofa, a quarry, a type of seaweed, a piece of rusted metal—where the presence of matter and materiality is dominant.” From there, the process becomes wonderfully obsessive and often transformational.

Take Roberge’s granite sofa. This remarkable object of leisure, paradoxically made of stone, was inspired by a Grecian sofa attributed to famed neoclassicist architect and woodcarver Samuel McIntire (1757–1811). The sculptor came across a photograph of the sofa in November 2008 while doing research on chaise longues, daybeds, and related furnishings at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.

After obtaining permission from the Winterthur Museum in Delaware to reproduce the sofa in granite, Roberge was on her way. A trip to downeast Maine in search of granite led to her to Russ Kaufman of Milbridge, the man who ultimately carved the stone. The granite was eventually found in Ontario.

Fast-forward to June 2010: workmen carefully off-load the finished sculpture into the foyer of the Farnsworth Art Museum. There the sofa has intrigued—and no doubt startled—many a visitor. The sculpture took two and half years from conception to delivery.

When asked about her favorite materials, Roberge admits that she has penchant for the raw and untamed—“what I call matter, the stuff of the earth, things like rock and minerals and ores,” she says. The artist is part geologist and has an intense appreciation for natural processes, including the results of eruption, crystallization, and erosion. She is kin to poet Abbie Huston Evans, who once wished to “darkly partake of the being of first rock.”

The artist has sought out her subject matter in different parts of the world, most notably Iceland, which she has visited on three occasions and which she considers to be one of “the most interesting land formations on the planet.” On her last trip there, in 2007, she stayed at one of the SIM (Samband Íslenskra Myndlistarmanna) artist residency studios, where she produced a series of twenty drawings titled What I Saw on the Glacier. Five of the drawings were inspired by flying over a glacier near Skaftafell National Park.

When she isn’t conceiving new work, Roberge is teaching the fall and spring semesters at the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida in Gainesville (she is head of the sculpture department). “Teaching is action,” she says, and the studio is like a laboratory, a place of “inquiry and experimentation.”

Roberge taught her first students when she was a tutor in the Upward Bound program at Bowdoin College in 1974. She has done stints at the Maine College of Art, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and Cape Elizabeth High School. Since taking the Florida position in 1993, she has moved from assistant to associate to full professor.

“I think I am a better person for having taught,” Roberge says. “I am definitely more patient.” As much as she loves teaching, she plans to retire soon and move back to Maine (she was born in Biddeford). Given the physical demands of sculpture, she feels it is imperative that she return to full-time art making as soon as possible.

The artist already has a place to live and work: a house and barn off Highland Avenue in South Portland. Purchased in the late 1990s, the place suits her “conflicting” needs—“to be in the city, yet have enough privacy to make a mess and lots of noise without bothering the neighbors.” The residence also satisfies her particular sculptural sensibility: the lot slopes down to the avenue following, as Roberge explains, “the incline of the mother rock that lies just below the surface.” She adds, “There are stone escarpments scattered here and there.” Certainly, these are aspects of the property that her realtor may not have fully appreciated.

With the help of jack-of-all-trades Bob Ware, the barn, which was a wreck, is being restored. Roberge has contributed her share of sweat equity, including sanding and priming many thousands of feet of clapboard for the house and barn. She also does the landscaping, and her long-range vision is to create a sculpture garden and “integrated permaculture mini-farm.” She has planted peach and plum trees, a variety of berry bushes, and a tiny organic herb and vegetable garden.

The buildings and grounds provide a retrospective of Roberge’s work, and examples from most of her series are on display. An early piece, Ric Rac, is from a group of steel sculptures she began in 1979 while on a Bernard Langlais scholarship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The piece was inspired by her mother, Mary Ellen Gleason Roberge, a virtuoso seamstress and doll maker who always had piles of fabric and trims, including ricrac, on hand for sewing to create all the clothes—for sports, school, and Sundays—worn by her nine children.

Roberge is currently working on a combination pear-wood carving and steel fabrication that she describes as a “hybrid tower/stack/mountain.” The wood came from a dead pear tree she cut down in her South Portland yard, and the steel section consists of small chairs piled up like those presently stacked in the loft of her barn.

The sculptor is also exploring the possibilities of seaweed, which she collected in Nova Scotia last summer during a Baie Sainte-Marie Artist and Family Residency at the Jenny Family Compound in New Edinburgh. She is working on drawings, sculpture, and photography using the seaweed as both raw material and subject matter. “It’s vague for now,” Roberge reports, but as anyone familiar with her work knows, the results are bound to fascinate.

Anodized steel, hand-selected river rock from the Truckee River
Dimensions: 54” x 58” x 40”
Location: Front Entrance to the NMA
Acquisition: Courtesy of the Artist and Funded by the City of Reno and the Nevada Museum of Art Volunteers In Art

Cairn, the most enduring of all the NMA sculptures, is popular with all age groups. It has greeted visitors to both the old and the new museum for many years. It is unique in that it is a “site specific” sculpture, created just for the NMA in 1998 by artist Celeste Roberge. The word cairn means “mound of stones erected to mark a site.” Roberge creates welded steel figures and fills them with various geologic materials gathered from the site local to where the sculpture is installed. Cairn represents a continuation of a series of rock figures that Roberge has been creating since the 1980s. Some are standing, some rising, and some walking. Her other cairns are rock-filled steel frameworks in the shape of globes and columns, and quarried rocks arranged as benches and outdoor “living room furniture.”

In 1999, the NMA presented an exhibit titled “From Exploration to Conservation: Picturing the Sierra Nevada” in which Roberge created a video installation commissioned by the museum that featured a tent and rocks in a stream of endlessly flowing water. Titled “Mountains and Rivers Without End,” it was a rocky streambed with a simulated “flow” of gurgling water.

Celeste Roberge (b. 1951) is an Associate Professor of Art and Sculpture Area Coordinator at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Her works are in numerous public and private collections across the U. S., mostly on the East coast. She lives and works in Gainesville, Florida, and South Portland, Maine.

At Runnymede Sculpture Farm in Woodside, CA, there are two Roberge Cairns: “Rising Cairn” and “Walking Cairn.” The following is a statement from the curator there: “These are our two most commented-upon pieces. People respond to these works viscerally and immediately. There is a dignity to these two pieces which draws the viewer into a contemplative space. Both pieces are female forms and modeled after Roberge herself. They are filled with river rocks and play upon the idea of ‘”figurative.’” We usually think of figurative sculpture as being carved out of rock: these are composed of rock. It’s as if you’re looking inside the people themselves; you see their viscera, their muscles. And the sculptures draw attention to the paradox of living: we live both inside ourselves, with emotions and thoughts, and we live outside in the world through actions and communication.”

About Cairns:
A basic cairn is a single stack of rocks essentially made to mark a path, territory, or site, or meant to be a tomb marker. The intent is utility and meaning rather than art. Those who place them are thinking of those who will come after. Those who find and follow them are trusting the travelers who went before.

Cairns of various types are found throughout the Neolithic world and recall early representations of women. Stacked or balanced, these offer places and moments for reflection, or meditation. Balanced stones are designed to stand for a long time without falling. Modern day hikers often refer to them as “trail ducks” when the top rock is larger and points the way at a turn. Some National Parks have rules of “rock etiquette” about cairns and the making of rock sculptures or the disruption of rock formations. Death Valley National Monument in California is one such place. Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine, also has an extensive system of cairns and rules about their construction. However, at Peace Cairn in Ireland (established in 1993) people are encouraged to bring a small rock or stone to add as a personal statement to symbolize the laying down of primitive weapons—turning them into building blocks of a better future.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s latest outdoor installation — a chaise lounge made of stainless steel and stones — “isn’t that big, but weighs a lot,” said artist Celeste Roberge of her creation titled Chaise Gabion.

Gabions, from the Italian word gabbione, are cages, cylinders or boxes filled with rocks, concrete or sometimes sand and soil that are used in civil engineering, road building and military applications. Roberge has been working with different kinds of rocks in various shapes since the 1980s.

“I like to use them in unusual ways,” she said.

She developed a prototype for Chaise Gabion for Emory University in Atlanta and has one on display at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine. Crystal Bridges acquired the fourth of several she’s fabricated.

The steel framework was developed digitally using software that is used by architects and engineers for computer-aided design and drafting. The types of stones or rocks used to fill the sculpture vary from piece to piece.

“It just depends on what’s available,” she said.

Crystal Bridges’ lead preparator, Chuck Flook, said Roberge’s piece, which is about the size of an actual lounge chair, weighs about 1,300 pounds and includes 17 75-pound bags of Mexican beach pebbles. It took two days to sort the rocks by size and then another three days to arrange them and place then by hand into Roberge’s sculpture. It took a team of four preparatorsto complete the piece on site, with Claire Pongonis doing most of the work, Flook said.

“(Roberge) gave us very specific instructions about how she wanted the stones placed and the sequence- to provide the overall end result and look,” he said.

Visitors are welcome to sit and lounge on Roberge’s work and take in the view from the museum’s East Terrace.

Though the chair may not look comfortable, Roberge said it is.

She’s also known for incorporating furniture into stonework, such as stacking chaise lounges and other pieces in walls of stone.

“It’s like the furniture is a fossil within the stone wall,” Roberge said.

There are currently 14 works placed along the Crystal Bridges trails and a few more will follow early next year, said Diane Carroll, media relations manager for the museum.

“This sculpture was acquired before the museum’s opening, and we’re now in the final stages of placing all of the outdoor sculptures in our collection along the trails,” she said. “As spring comes, be looking for some colorful additions to our sculpture trails.”

Roberge is expected to visit Crystal Bridges in April while participating in one of the Artosphere programs at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville. She’ll be a guest speaker during a lecture titled “Artists Collaborating with Nature.”

Florida-based artist Celeste Roberge is fascinated with creating art where there is an intersection of geological time and human time. She identifies the layers of history and memory that exist within everything, from people, to furniture, to natural materials found in the world around us. The artist says she creates sculptures where “the presence of matter and materiality is dominant,” and where combinations of fleeting human existence stand in direct harmony with the steady and enduring powers of nature.

Rising Cairns is a commanding sculpture where Roberge welded a steel grid into a rough likeliness of her own body, but much larger than real life, measuring 58″ x 54″ x 43″. Using raw materials from the surrounding land, Roberge filled the unique steel framework with 4,000 pounds of granite. There is a strong juxtaposition between the organized grid shell and the jumble of all shapes, sizes, and textures of rocks held within. Rocks that have existed for possibly millions of years are contained within the equally enduring steel frame, yet stand as representation of the fleeting and mortal human life. According to one review, “The cairns are, in the aggregate, massive and weighty, and seemingly unchanging, at least within our human time frame. Yet, with irony or humor, they help define a human form.”

Iceland is not so far away from Maine, only four to five hours by air from Boston or a hop, skip and a jump away by land and sea from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland and Greenland. Yet Iceland seems so exotic, so extreme in its geography and climate. It straddles the mid-Atlantic rift that separates the North American Tectonic plate and the European Plate. That precise location on the knife-edge of the rift is the source of all its geothermal glamour. By contrast, the old stone quarries of Maine have been domesticated, harvested, and abandoned. The quarries have an architectonic form that plunges into the dark negative space of the pit. How high can the volcano rise? How deep can we dig? How stable are those solid-looking chiseled walls of the quarry? Every shard of stone is a sculpture. Every mineral stain or miniscule growth of moss is a painting. The grandeur of the volcano and the quarry calls into question the impetus to make art: why make anything if everything is already there and inherently better.

I can only cope with the vastness of the volcano and the quarry by bringing it home and reducing it to a known activity like cooking and collecting. I can make pseudocraters in the bronze foundry. Recipe: Spread vegetable fat in a preheated cast iron skillet. Add molten bronze (2400°F) or molten aluminum (1200°). Watch it spit, steam, and bubble. (Double, double, toil and trouble.) Allow to cool. Note: Take necessary safety precautions.

You don’t need a hammer and a pick in Iceland. Everything is just lying there on the surface, direct evidence of violent acts that take place right now, yesterday, and long ago. Iceland is the present tense. Stacks for Home and Office relates to the geological immediacy of Iceland. Quarry relates to the older, lived-in quality of the quarries in Maine. Moss grows on both. It is the connector. The pits will sink and the earth will rise and someday the quarries of Maine and the volcanoes of Iceland will be similarly covered with a layer of rich earth. Time passes.

Iceland is all about matter and process. In Iceland the landscape is not just fantastically pictorial. It surges. It rumbles. It is baroque and tempestuous. You feel the relationship between action and emotion directly under your feet. That physical power is what attracts me. I am inspired by the materiality of sculpture, the potential of matter to embody meaning, almost inherently. The materials used in Stacks for Home and Office evoke unspoken events. Stone is ancient. Stone is cold, but produced in heat. Stone is absorbent of heat, cold, water, and of history. Trilobites, the insect-like ur-fossils, once populated the earth in the millions and now exist only as fossil forms. Food for thought. Gold is one of the most precious, heaviest, brightest, and softest minerals, like butter. Charcoal is both a product of heat and a source of heat—a conundrum, a reduction sauce.

Wherever you travel in Iceland, the hot/cold, Iiquid/solid, wet/dry polarities are much in evidence. I hiked up to a glacier along a steep trail that paralleled twenty-two waterfalls. The descending water was glacial; the ascending person was hot. I took a boat trip among the calf icebergs of Jokulsalon, the haunting shapes of the icebergs emerging from the wet fog-like witches from a glacial brew. When I read “Cooling the Lava,” an essay by John MePhee, on the attempt to divert the flow of lava away from the harbor of Heimaey during a volcanic eruption, I thought “what as traightforward concept. If something is too hot, add cold. If it is hot molten lava, add millions of gallons of frigid ocean water to solidify the edge of the encroaching lava field. If it works in the kitchen, why wouldn’t it work in the geology lab or in the art studio? Volcanoes spit out minerals like pumice, obsidian, olivine and ash. 1 collect, these minerals in cast iron pans for the hybrid stoves of hot pots, trying to contain them, trying to transform them with the heat of the sculpture.

Quarry is the acknowledgement that somewhere in my mind there occurs a conflation of the high energy basalt formations in Iceland and the ancient slate deposits in Maine. A volcano rises up in a conical formation. A quarry spirals down along a geometric grid. The pits are dark and fecund, one hot and one cold. Two inverted funnels of raw potential. Basalt thrusts upward in columnar formations, betraying its igneous origins—slate hugs the ground in a sign of its muddy beginnings and its humble, domestic uses for the roof, the floor, and the school blackboard. The slate quarries of maine and volcanic lava fields of Iceland seem inhabited— the quarries so recently abandoned that the remains of the stone continue to whisper.

A graduate of the Portland (now Maine) School of Art and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and a former fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, Celeste Roberge made her first major statements in sculpture in the late 1980s. Monumental pieces such as Rising Cairn (1989), a kneeling figure formed of 4,000 pounds of granite beach stones girdled in bands of galvanized steel, provoked a critical buzz. Since then, solo shows around the country have confirmed the sharpness of her conceptual vision, which has encompassed what the artist refers to as “cultural sedimentation.”

In her first show at Aucocisco, Roberge continued her explorations of layering while reducing the scale of her work from sculptures like Rising Cairn and her “Stacks” of shale and slate that often measure some 4 feet high by 6 feet long. Among the 14 sculptures in the show (all 2005 and 2006) were a series of 11 “miniatures” that consist of narrow stacks of materials– stone, metal, wood– topped by small toy chairs. The taller pieces were displayed on floor bases, the rest on cantilevered wall mounts.

In Copper and Slate Stack, neat squares of copper, slate and plywood are arranged in repeated order, rising 17 inches from the ground. The layers of material suggest geologic strata. Perched precariously on the top like an eccentric throne is a miniature armchair in a 1950s “modern” style, its seat filled with a ball of copper solder.

Eight of the stacks pay tribute to modern masters: Meret Oppenheim, Alberto Giacometti, Yayoi Kusama, Donald Judd, Eva Hesse and Joseph Beuys. Fur Covered Chair for (Meret Oppenheim) is a 19-by-¼-by- 2-inch construction of plywood and mahogany obscured by fur. In Piano Stack (for Beuys), a miniature baby grand covered with felt is set on a handsome 47-inch-tall pedestal of wood and copper. These appropriations elicit a knowing smile, while the meticulous craft of the miniature constructions conveys something of Roberge’s own sensibility.

The sculptural inventions contrast with three “mountains,” crag like forms of a more homemade appearance that have miniature chairs atop their peaks. Inspired by the distinctive shape of Mont St.-Michel on France’s Normandy coast, these plaster and Hydrocal objects rise a bit over a foot in height and are accented with basalt, slate, textiles and metal. The show also featured a dozen gouache, watercolor and ink drawings with gold and copper leaf, graphite and collage elements. Related to the sculptures, they add another dimension to the work: the plotting of enticing ideas.

Bent at the knees and waist, with both hands resting on thighs, the stone figure appears ready to unwind, stand erect and march right out of the courtyard at the Portland Museum of Art and into the flowing traffic on High Street. That is the beauty of Maine sculptor Celeste Roberge’s work: Even though ”Rising Cairn” is made of wire and stone and is very much rooted in the earth, it feels kinetic and alive.

Situated among the birth trees in the museum’s sculpture garden, ”Rising Cairn” stands as one of city’s signature art pieces, a true landmark that enchants passers-by on the street and those viewing the piece from the museum. And for many, it also is what they know best about the sculptor, the Biddeford-born Roberge. A new exhibition at the revamped Aucocisco Gallery in Portland gives people a different perspective of Roberge, and offers a deeper level of appreciation for her work.

She’s still exploring themes of man’s relationship with the earth, but doing so with whimsy, humor and a sense of playfulness. In ”Mountains & Miniatures,” on display this month at Aucocisco, Roberge displays intimate sculptures of dollhouse-style chairs that sit atop 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-foot thin towers constructed from disparate materials ranging from cherry wood and stainless steel to wax and fur.

Gone for now are the massive structures for which she made her name and built her reputation. This new direction started with a trip to an antiques store. Roberge came across a 19th-century psychiatrist’s couch while poking around Portland. She became obsessed with the sofa’s weight and what it symbolized, because of its use by psychiatrists. Inspired by her find, she began imbedding antique sofas in stacked stones to make the furniture feel like fossils or a funerary monument.

Roberge, who teaches sculpture at the University of Florida, began making furniture stacks four years ago. Her stack project still is going strong, although the current show at Aucocisco illustrates that Roberge’s vision is getting smaller. A dozen tiny chairs rise from the gallery floor and from shelves built on the gallery walls.

Roberge conceived ”Mountains & Miniatures” as an homage to the sculptors who have influenced her and who helped define 20th-century sculpture. Among those she honors with her work are Meret Oppenheim, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama, Joseph Beuys and Alberto Giacometti, using materials and themes they espoused in their work.

At least on the surface, the idea of making miniatures would appear to be a grand departure for Roberge, who is best known for her stone cairns. In truth, the chairs are merely the latest in a long line of Roberge sculpture that stems from her relationship with the land, said Suzette McAvoy, adjunct curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland.

”There is a continuous thread that runs through all of Celeste’s work,” said McAvoy, who has worked with the artist on several exhibitions over the years. ”They all deal with natural material and the figure.” ”In the miniature stacks that she is doing now, the chair is the stand-in for the human figure, if you think about the chair being the container of the body, a place for us to sit. They take on personalities, of different eras and designs. They all reflect different human interaction and different ages.”

In an interview, Roberge agreed that the miniatures continue a theme she has pursued much of her artistic life, which remains the pursuit of landscape, its materials and the psychological state associated with the landscape. She sees her stacks as core samples, lifted from the earth in perfect columns. They are a metaphor for time and place.

She started working smaller four years ago ”mainly because my back was killing me,” she said. She describes her new work as ”toy-like. They’re not meant to be serious or heavy-duty. They’re playful and humorous. When I began making them, I was working with doll house furniture, and I am sure kids would love to get their hands on them. Which is why they are placed way up high.”

Roberge has always identified with the landscape of the North Atlantic coast, and references it often in her work. Especially in her early pieces, she used stones from the area to build her sculptures. Lately, the material she chooses to build her columns often is basic, earthy matter, such as lead, basalt and slate.

Aucocisco Gallery director Virginia Sassman calls Roberge’s use of material part of her ”genetic memory. … She is very connected to the landscape of the North Atlantic, and it shows in her work through her choice of materials. Her work is very much of the landscape. She identifies with landscape in an intuitive sense.”

Roberge lives most of the year in Florida, where she has taught at the University of Florida in Gainesville for 14 years. But she maintains a strong presence in Maine, with a house and studio in South Portland. Before taking the job in Florida, she taught high school art at Cape Elizabeth. She loves Florida, much to her surprise.

”I didn’t think I would like it. I can’t say I like the heat, but I can’t say enough about the students,” she said, adding that many of her former students have gone on to have productive careers as artists. She returns to Maine each summer, and comes home often during the school year for family visits. There is no separating Maine from her work, she said.

”I’ve never stopped showing in Maine, because this is my community. Portland is my community. It’s very important being in Maine, when it comes to work. I tend to get my ideas in Maine, and I execute them in Florida.”

Staff writer Bob Keyes can be contacted at (207) 791-6457 or at: bkeyes@pressherald.com

Have you had the Eight Modern experience? Have you seen the glorious spanking new white walls, the luscious picture windows, and the dynamically subtle modifications they’ve made? If you want your beautiful old adobe to look like the Museum of Modern Art, this new gallery on Delgado Street is a total style pointer. It’s all about doors and windows, entry and light. Who cares that somewhere in the seventies Modernism puttered out of the great game of miniature golf we’ve all come to know and love. Rumor is they plan to change the name of that particular stretch of Delgado to Modern Street soon, anyhow.

We like round shiny things, we humans, we crows, we raccoons, and we modernists. If its curves gleam, we like it. We like the chain link spheres of John Ruppert made large in aluminum and steel. We like ’em for their transparency, their volume, their engineering, and their shiny curviness. We like ’em like we would like giant soap bubbles set down on the lawn, or alien robot pod husks filling the veranda, or spheroids of positive love vibration preparing to pollinate. We like ’em better than a grand piano and they’re musical in a whole different way.

Oh so boldly, the new gallery led off with a power-packed show of sculpture. Walter Dusenbery, once an assistant to the venerable Isamu Noguchi, filled several rooms with his pink travertine Minimalism. Like Noguchi, Dusenbery strives for elemental forms with universal appeal that seem both ancient and modern (there’s that word again). Dusenbery’s chosen material is the only carving stone that hardens in response to acid rain. While the marbles of the ancient world are rapidly melting away, Dusenbery’s travertines are firmly set on a foundation of architectonic timelessness.

Celeste Roberge presented an up-to-date stainless-steel chaise longue packed with river rocks in the lovely sculpture garden. Her works revolve around a bizarrely charged interest in furniture and fossilization. The most compelling pieces in the show are her miniature stackings of tiny objects and plaster. Their scale and intimacy reward intense contemplation, and they come as a welcome refreshment to all this Modernist monumentality. There’s a little Louise Bourgeois here and a touch of Robert Morris. Roberge is an artist we’d like to see more of. Warning: she may actually be post-modern.

Or simply surreal (the first pro-modernism), like Nancy Youdelman, an assemblagist who was a member of Judy Chicago’s first class in Feminist Art at Fresno. Her accumulated dresses are dense with ghosts of memory, and stand up especially well in bronze. An echo of the feminist art strategy–in which obsessive decoration becomes subject–is heard, but digging deeper each piece tells a woman’s story in the fragile voices of fading photographs, love letters longingly squeezed between ribbons and medals of valor, parched paper, dried flowers, butterfly buttons, thimbles, cymbals, trinkets, fancy pins, and souvenirs. Her approach to assemblage resonates with the modes of local artists Gail Reike and Andrea Senutovich.

Modes. Doesn’t that have something to do with modern? In China, cherries mean good luck in love. I believe in America there is a similar symbolic linkage, though it remains mainly in the crass parlance of the collective unconscious, so maybe your new mode ought to be like Ming Fay’s, in which there is no culture, only the elevation of nature. His sculptural gardening produces fruit, such as his oversize maraschino cherry dropped in the center of the space as if the gallery was a great big Manhattan cocktail. Robert Lobe uses a repoussé technique (it sounds French, but he’s cleared it with the administration) and large sheets of aluminum to record and abstract the surfaces of trees and rocks. Two large branching configurations, “machines” as he calls them when he feels constructivisty, hung alongside the gallery. Shiny, we like shiny, and these were. And Naumenesque was the sense of displacement (From the forest floor to floating above the side courtyard), making them all the more abstract and also slightly menacing.

Finally, we find the work of Robert Mangold. His colorful, pointy, tubular sculptures zig and zag like playground equipment made out of lightning bolts. Though they are pleasant enough in their sharp-angled way, they also make it clear that one of the pitfalls of Modernism is an overdependence on form all by its lonesome. Form is finem but sometimes the Modern seems to play it safe by striking more significant content. More artists like Celeste Roberge are the answer. Still and all, Eight Modern is off to a stunningly good start.

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO – Eight Modern celebrates its grand opening with the inaugural exhibit, Modern Dimensions: Contemporary American Sculpture. The exhibition brings together works by seven American sculptors: Walter Dusenbery, Ming Fay, Robert Lobe, Robert Mangold, Celeste Roberge, John Ruppert, and Nancy Youdelman. Each of these highly-acclaimed artists explores diverse facets of contemporary sculpture and integrates conceptual and aesthetic ideas in bold, new terms.

In developing Modern Dimensions: Contemporary American Sculpture for its grand opening, Eight Modern declares its confidence in establishing a unique venue imbued with history yet situated on the leading-edge. Analogously, the exhibit signifies the gallery’s commitment to premiering works by internationally acclaimed artists who have never before been represented in Santa Fe.

Walter Dusenbery’s sculptures are at once classically-inspired and wholly innovative. An assistant to Isamu Noguchi in the early 1970s, his works in stone apply classical ideals to organic forms and complement imposing grandeur with a sensuousness born of technical mastery. Dusenbery’s sculptures are held in several of the world’s most impressive collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Ming Fay’s elaborate multi-media sculptures are derived from organic sources, such as seed pods, vegetables, weeds, and other biomorphic forms. His work references the complex issues of Chinese folklore, botany, and contemporary urbanity. In addition to having received numerous awards for public works commissioned by organizations such as MTA Arts for Transit, Fay has held acclaimed solo-exhibitions in the world’s leading arts venues including MOCA Shanghai and the Whitney Museum, New York.

Robert Lobe sculpts sheets of aluminum to the spatial outlines of landscape configurations using a repoussé technique. His sculptures are not only haunting spectral images of nature abstracted, they represent an extreme re-contextualization of mechanical materials – stretching the parameters of industrial forms and methodologies. Lobe’s sculpture attained national recognition when it was prominently featured in the Whitney Museum’s famed exhibit, “Anti-Illusion.” His work is included in the collections of such noteworthy institutions as the National Gallery, Washington, D.C, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Robert Mangold’s primary artistic concern is the relationship of time and space as expressed through movement in sculpture. His series, PTTSAAES (Point Traveling through Space at an Erratic Speed), explores implied motion. In his daring works, ‘Point’ and ‘Space,’ respectively, are defined as the roving focus of the viewer’s gaze and the time in which one’s visual attention is transferred between segments of his geometric compositions. Exhibiting internationally since the early 1960s, he has won numerous awards including the Henry Moore Grand Prize from the Hakone Open-Air Museum, Tokyo.

Celeste Roberge investigates the intersection of geological and human forms. Melding the forms of river rocks, 19th century furnishings, and stainless steel, she focuses the viewer’s experience on the visceral impact of collided opposites: the fabricated pressed between the organic, the inviting caught in the threatening, and the ephemeral embedded within the enduring. Prompting her viewers both to abstract time and to sense its immediacy, Roberge’s work engages not only the concepts of pure archaeology but also the continual excavation of desires that the chaise lounge, the iconic fixture of the psychiatrist’s office, evokes. She is the recipient of the prestigious Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant.

John Ruppert’s sculptures address the dynamics of change. Translating vegetal forms into industrial materials, he both asserts and defies the inevitability of natural phenomena, and invests his subject matter with abstract qualities by stripping them of their original colors, details, and textures. His series of airy chain-link vessels evoke constructed boundaries, yet their delicate forms integrate fully into their surrounding environments. Exhibited and collected internationally, reviews of his work have been published in Art in America, Sculpture, and the New Art Examiner.

Nancy Youdelman centers on the relationships between objects and memory, eliciting feelings of adoration, nostalgia, and lost hope. Her mixed-media assemblages integrate personal artifacts and natural materials with girl’s and women’s clothing. Exalting and concentrating memory, her works recast as sublime the forgotten objects of quotidian experience. A leading authority and practitioner in the field of Feminist Art who has studied extensively with Judy Chicago, she is the recipient of numerous awards including recent grants from both the Pollock/Krasner and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundations.

Modern Dimensions: Contemporary American Sculpture will run from Friday, May 4, through the summer. Eight Modern is open daily from 9:30am to 6:00pm at 231 Delgado Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501. For further information and image requests, contact Alex Ross via email at alex@eightmodern.net or by phone at (505) 995-0231.