Jo Sandman : Once Removed
 |
Big/Small, 1994 |
|---|
September 6, 2008 — November 9, 2008
Opening Reception Saturday, September 13, 6 - 8 pm
Gallery Talk Wednesday, September 10, noon and Sunday, October, 19, 3 pm
The Danforth Museum of Art is pleased to present Jo Sandman: Once Removed, a 35 year survey of more than 30 works of mixed media, sculpture and video installation by renowned Boston artist Jo Sandman. The exhibit will be on view in the main galleries from September 6th through November 9th. On Sunday, October 19th, the artist will speak on her work at 3pm. All are welcome to attend.
About the Artist
Jo Sandman began her career at a time when artists across the country had begun to challenge traditional approaches to making art. In 1951 she was in residence at Black Mountain College at the same time as Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, and was galvanized by their experimental approach to materials. Following graduation from Brandeis University in 1952, she spent the summer as a student in the Hans Hofmann School of Painting in Provincetown. She continued her studies with Hofmann and Robert Motherwell after moving to New York City, and worked as Hofmann’s registrar in his New York School until 1953. Sandman went on to receive her MFA in painting at the University of California, Berkeley in 1954, and later received a teaching degree at Radcliffe in 1956. During this time, she met Walter Gropius who employed her as a mural designer and color consultant at The Architects Collaborative (TAC) from 1956 until 1958. Sandman taught at Wellesley College from 1958 until 1963 before leaving to raise her family. In 1980 she resumed a full time commitment to working as an artist, and in 1981 began teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art, where she still teaches today.
About the Exhibit
Jo Sandman: Once Removed is a 35 year survey of more than 30 works by an artist who began her artistic career during the 1950’s. Witness to experimentation that became historically important, Sandman was a student of both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, and at Black Mountain College with Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. Like many young painters of her generation, she embraced the challenges and opportunities offered up during a time of great aesthetic change.
Sandman began making her mark by folding canvas onto itself to create minimalist works that are sensual and rich. Delighted by the sheer physicality of industrial material, she’s hacked into stained dropcloth, peeled away strips of insulation foil, and heated roofing tar to draw with her fingers. Laying down ropes of white caulk onto emery paper, she has created drawings that managed to be both whimsical and serious, a kind of industrial painting on velvet. Found objects are important to Sandman, and ideas come unexpectedly.
While waiting for her car to be repaired at a garage, she noticed radiator hoses and was struck by their ability to “be both organic and industrial.” Between 1993-1995, Sandman experimented by filling these radiator hoses with plaster, and affixing these snake-like forms directly to walls or displaying on sculpture podiums. Inspired by Brancusi’s respect for the quality of material, Sandman began to cut into these sculptures to reveal crisp white plaster at the core. She also scored their rubber coating with a knife, conscious of the scarification in African tribal art that had so inspired Picasso.
Removed sections were not discarded, but used to create other works. Big/Small greets the viewer with a quirky nod, a little figure who can barely stand after wedge shaped cuts have compromised his base. Other removals found their way into a series of black and white relief set onto the grid. Variously entitled, Echoes from the Garden or Echoes, these wedges, mini slabs and cross sections of plaster reference the artist’s love of disruption, if not outright subversion.
This exhibit has allowed Sandman to reconnect with a body of work that had been completed in 1995. Continuity is a completely new installation of plaster filled radiator hoses, which Sandman sees as broken fragments of language, sentences that have been taken apart for examination. She has also created a collaborative video with videographer Bebe Beard and composer Lou Cohen. While Beard worked to capture Sandman’s sculpture on videotape, Cohen recorded music that Sandman improvised by singing and tapping and then used these basic sound elements to create his own commentary on the sculpture and video. The result is a new and unexpected piece of work from an artist who has used experimentation as the basis of her long career.
In the end, Sandman is a profoundly spiritual artist who uses formal means to seek meaning—a conceptualist firmly grounded by her physical sense of the world. Once removed from the act of painting, she continued to pursue painterly concerns. While she may have used a grid as the basis for many compositions, the power of her compositions lies in Sandman’s ability to break the rules. Her work is subtle and expressive, filled with an emotion that will not be contained.
Copyright © 2008 Danforth Museum of Art. All rights reserved. — Contact