Continuing
the tradition of the Hoshour Gallery, which brought artists with
international reputations to this storefront space near the railroad
tracks in downtown Albuquerque, for two months Kathleen Shields
loaned three rooms of her new project space to the pragmatic imagination
of Terri Lindbloom's austere constructions of metal bars welded
at
right angles, attached to, disappearing into, the limen of the
gallery's white walls.
Using
also glass, along with photographs of her video stills, Lindbloom,
an installation artist based in Tallahassee, Florida, creates
airy systems of positive space that realize an aesthetic formed
during
her three summers in northern Morocco, as well as her studies
of church architecture in southern Europe. Demurely
dressed with sheets of sandblasted glass, one etched with Noël
Arnaud's abrupt Je suis l'espace où je suis, declaring
the artist's relationship with recursive transitional space,
the artist imposed
a squarely seated structure with anthopomorphic intonations,
a sort of skeleton of a Henry Moore woman; her lengthy lap.
In
the adjoining room, a similarly constituted work "though
we can walk into this one's interior of three sides" is
baptized with natural light from the peaked skylight directly
above.
Wedded
to the straight lines and right angles that grace Western aesthetics,
crescent shaped clamps serve to torque Lindbloom's study of Islamic
symbolic motivations.
This
dialogue between transcendent values and local codes continuously
marks her work, as with the three empty cradles which, when tipped,
describe their arc in the air without losing their ponderous
grounding, even while playing off the rigid splayed-out sparseness
of their
siblings in the other rooms.
Hope
is rocked in these gravid crucibles, as the darkest, most violently
confusing of times always gestate diffused illumination, as when
Lindbloom used batting to cushion the heavy stanchions from scoring
the gallery's wooden floor; then seeing stray waves and sprays
of the cotton, she incorporated them into the flux of her vision.
With
an eye for foundational concerns, and a feeling for sacral space,
the brazen activity of Lindbloom's mind is fused with what she
constructs, fleshing out the irony of postmodernism's "difficult
unity of exclusion," by reclaiming the broken bones of our
most ancient beliefs as ironically dysfunction spaces.
(c) Joel Weishaus 1993