By Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, February 15, 2008
RICHMOND -- Visiting Sue Johnson's sculpture show at the University of Richmond is like dropping in on a quirky dinner party.
Johnson's titles may promise "Venison Dinner Platter," but your entree won't arrive medium rare. Instead, you'll get seven ceramic Bambis circled up on a platter, their saucer-round eyes blinking up from the plate.
The artist, who teaches at Maryland's St. Mary's College, lends dinner a social conscience in these recent sculptures. Sometimes Johnson's work suggests real food -- the goopy mac and cheese in one sculpture might pass for a blue-plate special. But more often, Johnson favors food's mercantile mascots. Thus the Pillsbury Doughboy, Sprout (the Jolly Green Giant's peewee friend) and Mr. Potato Head all appear on Johnson's plates.
To make them, she cast entrees, food mascots and the occasional side dish in shiny slip-cast vitreous china -- the same material toilets are made of. Called "Eating Wonderland," the series gleams with antiseptic shine.
The project marks Johnson's first foray into three dimensions, and it looks to be her best work yet.
Simple and straightforward, these pieces pack a punch more direct than the baroque, collage-based works that the 50-year-old artist has built her career on. Here, she wraps food industry critique in a humorous, nostalgic package.
Johnson created the works last winter during a two-month residency sponsored by Wisconsin's John Michael Kohler Arts Center. She worked in the same Kohler plant that produces toilets and sinks, firing her creations alongside the commodes.
With food as its subject and bathroom equipment its medium, "Eating Wonderland" flirts with the scatological. A sense of child's play -- and children's jokes about digestion, poop and vomit -- lend the show a comical, if slightly icky, undercurrent.
Johnson enjoys posing food characters in suggestive or compromising positions. She imagines the Pillsbury Doughboy as a submissive, positioning him face down with a pat of butter melting on his tush. As for Sprout, he floats face up in a bowl of soup next to a long, brown wiener. Sprout's placid expression implies he's cooling off on a hot summer day, but his embalmed state suggests he may have eaten his last split pea.
These tableaux ring comical, but serious ideas emerge, too. Johnson has the number of those child-focused marketing campaigns, one assumes, when she plops the Doughboy on a plate. What with charming mascots initiating tots into consumer ritual at ever earlier ages, walking through Johnson's show makes one wonder if the distance from the Green Giant to Joe Camel isn't so far after all.
Before Johnson embarked on her residency, she'd made fantasy-based collage works alluding to botany, anatomy and encyclopedias. A recent series of digital inkjet prints hand-worked with gouache, also on view in Richmond, recall these earlier efforts.
Yet compared with her vibrant sculptural works, these prints fall flat. Their imagery, while occasionally intriguing, feels pat.
Johnson's most appetizing ideas inhabit three dimensions, where her success rests on the precision of their balance. Her nostalgic evocations of diners, childhood commercials and '50s-era optimism risk miring us in treacle. But Johnson's wicked sense of humor and her sharp use of materials deliver the works from excess.
The Doughboy's charm may grab our attention, but it's Johnson's smarts that give us food for thought.
Teresita Fern¿ndez At Reynolds GalleryTo celebrate the 30th anniversary of Reynolds Gallery -- probably Richmond's toniest art dealership, which boasts a roster of artists I wish Washington galleries would show -- owner Bev Reynolds hosts the cerebral, formalist work of New York City-based artist Teresita Fern¿ndez. Reynolds invited Fern¿ndez because of the artist's links to Richmond; she's a 1992 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University's top-flight MFA program in sculpture. Fern¿ndez now shows at Chelsea's Lehmann Maupin and received a MacArthur "genius" grant three years ago.
Like sculptor Tara Donovan, another VCU grad who has done well, Fern¿ndez stresses formal and intellectual concerns using simple materials.
The show's guiding image is the elongated rectangle of the movie screen. Most pieces here include the form, whether in delicate drawings or abstract wall-hung works. Each time it appears, it arrives with a different set of connotations, serving both as the show's ballast and its source of variation.
The 8 1/2 -foot-wide wall piece "Projection Screen (Black Onyx)" plays with perception in a manner reminiscent of light artist James Turrell. From afar we see a hovering rectangle. Up close the work dissolves into a series of onyx discs attached to the wall. As we move around the gallery, we become aware of our perception changing as we move in relation to the art.
Elsewhere in the show hang a series of ink and graphite drawings on Mylar that take the shape of tiny movie screens. Mounted in large white frames, the images hover unmoored like flickering hallucinations. Another series finds the screen shape on wall-hung marble slabs that glow like the movie screen photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto (seen at the Hirshhorn two years ago). The form is nostalgic, but the material recalls ancient statuary, suggesting that the screens are relics, too.
Sue Johnson at the Lora Robins Gallery of Design From Nature, University of Richmond Museums, Richmond Way at Boatwright Library, Tuesday-Friday 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturday-Sunday 1-5 p.m., 804-289-8276 to June 15;
Teresita Fern¿ndez at Reynolds Gallery, 1514 Main St., Richmond, Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., 804-355-6553, to March 1;
http://www.reynoldsgallery.com.
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