Nancy Shaver at feature

Nancy Shaver's esthetic is based on investigating the ordinary. Although her art most often falls in an area where painting, sculpture and installation intersect, she cites her studies with the photographer Walker Evans as a crucial influence. When one recalls that timeworn, familiar things were a mainstay of Evans's photographs, this begins to make sense.

Shaver's most recent exhibition consisted of nine reliefs attached to the gallery's walls at eye level. Most of them are made from wooden crates that must be at least 50 years old, with the open side facing the viewer. The age-darkened wood contrasts with the bright house paint that Shaver applies to portions of the interior surfaces or to paper stretched over the openings of some of the boxes.

In Yellow Partition (2001), Shaver partially concealed the interior of a double-chambered box--it measures 11 by 17 by 7 1/2 inches--through attaching a roughly cut rectangle of yellow-painted paper over the upper left half of the the front opening. Inside there's a buckling piece of silver-painted paper edged by a ridge of glazing compound. On the right, Shaver employed yellow paint, white paint atop scribbled pencil marks and a sheet of heavy paper painted in equal divisions of yellow and gray. The object maintains a quietly absorptive power. Shaver seems interested in leading the viewer in and around the box, presuming that the suggestiveness of old wood, the shiny and flat contrasts of painted surfaces and the flimsiness of the paper will be enough to stay the eye and the mind.

And they do. Looking at Streamline (2001), another slightly smaller box relief, is like staring at a window with the blinds drawn and imagining what is going on behind it. A devastatingly beautiful red square on a pale lemon ground animates the paper membrane that covers the front opening. The only views into the empty interior are from cracks in the sides where the paper is unglued. Shaver establishes a dialogue here, as in the other work, where our desire to look is aroused solely by a constructed, abstract space of indeterminate vintage, so that any further drama that takes place, we realize, has been derived from what we bring to it with our own imaginations.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group