In his fourth solo exhibition at C. Grimaldis Gallery, The Nature of Things, veteran sculptor John Ruppert continues his ongoing conversation with geological forms and natural forces, while adding his less-exhibited photography and video to the mix. Ruppert’s known for his elegant metalwork and exceptional reproductions of natural objects, particularly pumpkins and splintered wood, and his current exhibition is overtly Zen. Concealed from the street with two large shades over the front window, which serve to obscure the bustling, unpredictable outdoor distractions from the calm gallery contents, The Nature of Things is an enclave of calm on North Charles Street.

At the front of the gallery, a large, deceptively realistic iron rock sits illuminated in the corner. The small manufactured boulder sits to the side of a wedge-shaped metal grid that supports the weight of a large metal object resting diagonally across the incline. “Sunken Grid With Strike” is a combination of inorganic metal mesh with one of Ruppert’s signature wood-like forms. Falling somewhere between the organized structures of Sol LeWitt and the natural arrangements of Andy Goldsworthy, the sculpture on its own is elegant and pleasantly simple. Ruppert adds an experimental video element, which had its Baltimore debut at Grimaldis at Area 405 in June of 2008. The accompanying video piece, a full frame of koi fish swimming slowly in a pond, was filmed last year during the artist’s trip to Shanghai. The piece is projected onto the floor and wall around and onto the sculpture, creating a lava-lamp effect, with slow-moving blobs of orange trapped within the visible frame edge. While algae, barnacles, or deep-sea imagery would have more directly suggested submersion, the koi steer the mood away from potential water anxiety and into an Eastern sensibility, which spills out into the rest of the exhibition.

Like a Zen garden, the elements in the exhibition sit within the minimal landscape of the long narrow gallery. In the rear room, a single piece, “Core With Rocks (2011),” a circular metal sculpture with three outlying cast-iron rocks, has a suggested expanding energy that (along with its large proportions) fills the entire divided exhibition space. Radiating in rings of wire mesh, which become more optically dense toward the center of the “core,” Ruppert’s sculpture mimics the calming, repetitive concentricity of water ripples—a more contemporary substitution, perhaps, for raked sand. Simultaneously delicate and imposing, “Core” pauses an imagined elemental pulse. Dramatically spot-lit as nature could never replicate, the constructed material qualities are enhanced—oxidized iron rocks glow a Martian red, the steel sparkles—and add their own unique allure.

Between the two open exhibition spaces, the artist has included a series of landscape photographs. These serene images of clouds, water, and hazy horizons directly freeze the atmospheric conditions and natural phenomena that serve as mental backdrops to the sculptural works: expansive dark clouds over a still coast, sunlight bursting through a murky sky. Ruppert’s photos, like his cast-rock reproductions, offer another impression of nature as it is seen and captured by the artist.

In addition to the gallery exhibition, Ruppert will be unveiling a three-day satellite show during this year’s Artscape festival at his Druid Hill Avenue studio. While the works at Grimaldis are all made within the past year, the studio show will include works from throughout the artist’s 20-plus-year Baltimore career, including pieces from his Lightning Strike series, Celestial series (rapid prototypes), and a chain-link sculpture, along with the debut of a new sound installation. In contrast to the pristine white gallery and bonsai-like control of each element within the Grimaldis space, the studio show will allow viewers a glimpse at the artist’s mental and physical workplace, where each piece has at some point been a work in progress.

The Nature of Things presents a series of constructed objects that defy their artificiality and create moments of suggested harmony between artist, observer, and nature. Transforming space into serene, meditative esplanades through organic pacing and order, Ruppert’s use of space, light, form, and texture affect the equilibrium of each piece in equal measure. By opening his studio to the public, Ruppert reveals his awareness and control of each of these elements throughout the entirety of his process.

There are elemental forces at work in John Ruppert’s work. In his exhibit at Washington College’s Kohl Gallery, on view through October 6, Ruppert investigates the moon, the sun, gravity, and the alchemy of fiery heat and metals, in short, the forces that made this earth and keep it going.

A rock sits on the gallery floor side by side with its twin, a copy of itself cast in iron. Would you look at the shadowy concavities, craggy angles and weightiness of this rock as closely if it sat alone? Staged with its duplicate, it invites puzzling out the differences between its grainy mineral textures and the faintly velvety rusting surface of the casting. The intense heat of molten metal comes to mind, but how does that compare with the unimaginable fiery temperatures and pressures that formed the rock? And which is more interesting, the rock or its manmade facsimile?

Ruppert is a wizard at raising such questions, and he works on many levels. Some of his concerns are familiar to any student of art. Catching shadows cast on water, he plays with foreground and background in a photo of moonlight on a lake, and he pushes the boundaries of perception with a black-on-black photo of a spruce tree wreathed in darkness. With his tall, jagged sculptures cast from wood splintered by lightning, he casually references “Bird in Flight,” Brancusi’s inspired encapsulation of the joyous rush of flight. Duchamp’s found object sculptures and the Minimalists’ use of industrial materials are the predecessors of his turning of a mundane and slightly obnoxious material, chain-link fencing, into art.

A long-time teacher of sculpture and drawing at the University of Maryland, College Park, and veteran of many museum and gallery shows, he is thoroughly ensconced in the art world. But Ruppert doesn’t set his sculptures on pedestals, and that’s a clue that the real subject of his work is the natural world. By placing his sculptures directly on the floor, he grounds them, maintaining their simplicity and signally they are truly of the earth.

The relationship of earth and sky is fundamental in much of Ruppert’s work, and he explores it in both his photographs and his “Lightning Strike” series. Inspired by a shattered piece of pine he found while walking in the woods, the latter works on a theme familiar in art as well as in folklore—the tree as a conduit between the two realms. In his bronze or iron castings of wood splintered by lightning, the strength and structure of the growing tree are faithfully reproduced in the details of its wood grain. The violent power of the lightning is also plain to see, particularly in the gleam of a polished edge in “Bronze Wall Strike.” Curiously, the effect is a simultaneous evocation of the tree, the lightning and the devastating instant of impact.

Ruppert’s photographs also capture meetings in time and space. His digital shots of shifting light and darkness are so subtly and richly hued that they read almost as paintings or pastel drawings. Quieter and more introspective than his sculptures, they speak of even more immense forces and remind us that the changing light of sun and moon were for millennia the only clues humans had to the mechanics of earth’s relationship to the cosmos.

The seemingly monochrome “Final Light” delicately blooms with color as you focus in on its gray sky tinged with blue above a horizon marked with three dark islands. In the sea spreading before them, gray-blue and gray-pink gently weave together to form waves. The luminous softness Ruppert has captured comes from the light of the setting sun refracting through the atmosphere back to the eastern horizon. In this instant, as sea, islands and the breathable layer of air protecting them wait to be engulfed by the approaching darkness, you can feel the mighty turning of the earth rolling away from the sun.

The photographs and cast sculptures in this exhibit share a sensuous elegance that speaks of the power and beauty of the natural world, but one sculpture is odd man out. “Crucible,” an open-bottomed cone of chain-link fencing, stands by itself near a corner of the gallery. Gleaming in the gallery lights and radiating intricately patterned shadows on the floor, it has a kind of beauty but it’s also mildly off-putting. Why would Ruppert use this bland, utilitarian material? It’s another one of his mischievous questions.

A crucible is a vessel in which metals or other substances are transformed into something new. It’s a physical version of the mythic cauldron of possibilities, the alchemical source of all creation. Open at the bottom (perhaps indicating open-ended possibilities), it’s also a diagram of gravity. The weave of the fencing pulls against itself as gravity pulls down on its flaring sides. Its circular symmetry preserves its delicate balance and neatly forms a metaphor for the equilibrium that makes life on earth possible.

Primary forces like gravity and sunlight go almost unnoticed in everyday life but they’re always present. Noticing them is not our habit, at least not outside the parochial boundaries of the sciences. Yet earlier cultures considered them to be key to existence and made a point of acknowledging and celebrating them. This is a nearly lost sensibility and perhaps it’s at the root of our modern-day lack of a deep understanding of our place on earth. With simple and straightforward means, Ruppert slyly conjures the intricate relationships of natural forces on this planet.

Ruppert is first in a series of Distinguished Visitors brought to Washington College as part of its new initiative, Sandbox. Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Sandbox is an interdisciplinary program investigating the relationships of the individual, society and the environment through creative collaboration between the arts and the sciences.

A spiral-shaped vessel made of interlocking sections of reddish-brown mahogany flooring catches the eye in “Enclosures,” a new exhibition at the Grounds for Sculpture.  Beautiful in appearance, innovative in its use of materials and skillful in its execution, this intriguing-looking object by Foon Sham stands as a symbol for the more than two dozen artworks in this delightful group show.

It could also stand as a symbol for a strand of contemporary art. Though it has no name, its chief characteristics are familiar: artwork exhibiting skill and careful hand finishing. Everywhere you look these days, artists are returning to the idea of craftsmanship as the foundation for art. It is an encouraging sign after years of formless conceptual nonsense.

At any rate, “Enclosures” offers many beautiful and well-made sculptures by four mid-career artists — Jon Isherwood, John Ruppert, Wendy Ross and Mr. Sham — who deal in one way or another with ideas of enclosed spaces. This is a modern twist on an old notion, for sculptural vessels and containers of various kinds have been at the heart of art-making since the dawn of time.

The show opens with a selection of Mr. Isherwood’s carved marble forms. Though abstract, the forms are sensual and even occasionally erotic, for somehow Mr. Isherwood manages to make marble look as if it were soft and fleshy. In short, what is peculiar and astonishing about Mr. Isherwood’s sculptures is the way they make the viewer think of the human body without directly resembling it.

Partly, I think, it is a result of the shapes — squat, bloated-looking forms spilling and sprawling all over the place. They provoke associations with a pudgy stomach or the rolls of dimpled flesh on a voluptuous woman. Then there is the artist’s use of fine vertical carved lines to contour the marble, creating the illusion of stretched skin. The overall result looks like a cross between a beanbag and a water balloon.

Other artists in the exhibition make more conventional-looking enclosures. Mr. Ruppert makes baskets out of galvanized steel and aluminum chain-link fencing. These are monumental works of assemblage art, the baskets sometimes more than 10 feet high and 12 feet wide. They are really more like cages than baskets, containing and visualizing for viewers a sense of empty space.

Mr. Ruppert writes in a statement in the exhibition catalog that the use of chain-link fencing was influenced by the urban environment of his studio; he is the chairman of the art department at the University of Maryland in College Park and lives in Baltimore. This connection hints at other kinds of meanings, specifically a darker, more dangerous world that pulses beneath the clean, shiny surface of the sculptures.

Ms. Ross also works with coiled steel, though to very different ends. She is interested in the simple aesthetic pleasures of primary shapes and forms, like tubes and spheres. Many of her sculptures are made of little Modern Twist to an Age-Old Idea – cones of coiled steel welded together to take on the appearance of old-fashioned translucent glass. The cones also give her works a pleasing sense of volume, density and weight.

Ms. Ross’s sculptures, primarily concerned with issues of surface and form, don’t fit all that neatly within the exhibition theme, enclosures. By contrast, Mr. Sham’s wood constructions are all about the relationships between interior and exterior space. They are also transparently complicated, consisting of idiosyncratic structures with intriguing openings. They look like jerry-built children’s playhouses.

Mr. Sham patterns and layers the surface of his sculptures using woods of contrasting stains, textures and natural colors. That is clever, for it renders visible something we often take for granted in art: it makes us understand structure as material, or how surface and form connect.

This may seem like a small thing, but it is part of what makes Mr. Sham’s artworks stand out.

“Enclosures,” Grounds for Sculpture, 18 Fairgrounds Road, Hamilton, through April 27. Information:
(609) 586-0616 or www.groundsforsculpture.org.

n Goucher College’s contribution to Artscape, curator Laura Amussen attempts to deliver an exploration of the use of the circle in a not so creatively named exhibition, Full Circle. But before you roll your eyes at the title, give it a chance. You’ll find the exhibition really does resolve itself in the end.

Amussen offers a series of sphere-covered abstract paintings by local artists Carol Miller Frost, Tim Horjus, and Kate MacKinnon. The sheer visual monotony of circle after circle ultimately and unfortunately downplays their individual aesthetic value. Here, the exhibition’s theme is far too apparent and certainly does a disservice to these otherwise strong painters.

Refreshingly, relief is found in a number of the exhibition’s later artworks, starting with Hadieh Marjan Shafie’s remarkably constructed mixed-media pieces. Indeed, Shafie marks the turning point where Full Circle’s exploration of different mediums actually begins. At first glance, it’s easy to mistake Shafie’s meditative and strangely organic pieces for paintings, but given a closer look, they reveal their structural complexity. Each contains an amalgam of scrolled papers varying in size, tightness, shade, and thickness. Occasionally, Shafie adds hints of bright color to the mix by tying red thread across the bundles of paper.

Youngmi Song Organ continues her work with nontraditional materials with “Bubbles,” a large-scale yet quietly intimate piece made from human hair on paper. Mapping out softly perceptible circles with hair against a skin-colored paper, Organ creates a sense of communion with the viewer, connecting us to the undeniably human elements of the inanimate and abstracted work.

John Ruppert, whose larger scale works can also be seen in Grimaldis @ 405, provides two works on paper as well as two chain-link sculptures whose metallic elements provide a striking contrast to the soulful softness of Organ’s “Bubbles.” Here you begin to see the transformation a simple shape can undergo when subjected to different mediums. “Crucible,” an inverted conical chain-link sculpture creates an almost percussive sense of movement as the work interacts with the light and the viewer, casting changing shadows on the white plank below.

Renée Rendine rounds out the bunch, with an amorphous, netlike sculpture of fishing line, and reintroduces color with a shocking electric blue. Incorporating hues seen earlier in the exhibition with a unique sculptural approach, Rendine’s works give a sense of finality to the show.

John Ruppert’s human-scale vessels of cyclone fencing float like ghostly, woven cocoons in the landscape. The webs of industrial strength lace – a “Gourd” a “Sphere” – look tethered to the earth only by the shadows that they cast upon it. These look more substantial than the objects themselves, at times. Indeed, the hazy apparitions of iron and air appear as insubstantial veils of light and shadow; while they “hold” everything in their semi-transparency, they “contain” nothing, presenting a neat, minimal paradox.

For several years as a young boy in the early 1960s Ruppert lived with his family in Amman, Jordan. During this time, he became interested and active in archeology and traveled throughout areas of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and Cyprus visiting sites and participating in several archaeological digs. By his own account, “Experiencing the remains of ancient cities and civilizations in the barren landscape has had a lasting effect on my artwork and me.”

Over the years, Ruppert has expressed this “lasting effect” in diverse works that, directly and obliquely, have articulated themes surrounding the material remains of past cultures – how they came to be, and how they came to vanish leaving such pregnant traces.

In these emanations of air and steel mesh we may sense reflections of everything from ancient basket weaving to a desert mirage. Now, however, set in the landscape of the Digital Age, they become more real, more visible, as does the cluttered environment that surrounds and passes through them. Also, as the shimmering silver matrix beckons with its illusion of shelter, we are reminded that this medium is, and has been for some time, the preferred choice of fencing for borders, detention camps, and prisons.

In contrast to the lyric, metaphorical nature of these diaphanous wire vessels is the literal physicality of Ruppert’s super-sized, partially deflated pumpkins cast in aluminum. These huge, bulbous fruits of ash-gray metal flesh seem to sink into the earth under their own overripe overweight; yet, at the same time, they seem like hollow, lighter-than-air paper-thin shells.

Ruppert, who received his MFA from the School for American Craftsman, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, has always been keen to reveal the manner of his sculpture-making and he makes no effort to conceal the fact that these replicas of nature, with their obvious seams and flaps, are fabricated. It is difficult to say, at times, what they are made of – welded metal or stitched fabric – but they are obviously constructed and resemble everything from a giant sleeping armadillo to a big stuffed pillow.

In the end, Ruppert’s large-scale, metal-skinned homages to the vegetable world, like his chain-link vessels, create and maintain a delicate balance between the organic and industrial, the made and the grown, the actual and virtual, the lost and found. The myriad contradictions and conundrums conjure a nagging tension of perceptions and illusions that are resolved in the meticulous craft and artistry of their making.

Vulcan, patron of smiths, is also John Ruppert’s muse. Fascinated by the earth’s magma and its geological extrusions, and drawn to the industrial forge, which mimics the process of vulcanism, Ruppert casts his sculptures in aluminum, bronze and iron. His obdurate forms can address themselves to nature or to the brawny technology of heavy manufacturing; they are also strongly narrative, relating the history of their own making.

The earliest piece in the exhibition, Ingot and Mold (1983), is neatly didactic: a 5 1/2-foot steel trough, standing on end, accompanies the bronze prism that took shape inside it, recalling the Process art of the late 1960s, when Richard Serra documented his sequential castings in lead. Another self-explicatory work, Glacier Boulders (1993), is composed of a real rock and its two “portraits” in bronze and aluminum. Comparing the original and its simulacra, one thinks inevitably of the foundry, of the molten metals and sand shells that Ruppert used to produce these elegant impostors. And, of course, granite itself is an igneous rock, the end product of a comparable fiery formation over geological time.

A series of “Lightning Strikes” consists of long, slender totems Ruppert cast from the splintered fragments of storm-damaged trees. Freestanding or propped against the wall, these sculptures pay tribute to the once-living tree as well as the flashing force that instantly destroyed it. Most recently, with his “Pumpkin Series” (1996), Ruppert began an investigation of organic form: here, a ponderous, 600-pound gourd is frozen in time, its mass memorialized in an edition of five cast-and-welded aluminum replicas that testify to nature’s fecundity. The sagging weight of these gigantic fruits suggests a moment of ripeness, poised between expansive growth and collapsing decay. Although these works depart from the artist’s earlier celebrations of metallurgy, they still exhibit traces of their manufacture, in welded seams and excess metal that curls from the surface like peeling skin.

Echoing the pumpkins’ bulbous bodies were two huge onion-shaped works made from chain-link fencing: the 11 -foot Vortex (1994), suspended by cables from the ceiling, and Chamber (1995), almost as tall, standing imposingly on its own. What these lacy fence-vessels convey most of all is a kind of biological, even sexual subtext to Ruppert’s oeuvre. They are uterine, inspiring fantasies of safety and protection, just as the lightning pieces are powerfully phallic and the pumpkins, pregnant and nurturing. Ruppert’s gift, his technical savvy, is such that he can imbue these cold, hard metals with a sense of organic vitality.

[This show traveled to the Virginia Arts Center and is now at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Nov. 15, 1996-Jan. 26, 1997.]

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.