piano

Music for a hot, summery afternoon: For Bunita Marcus (review), as performed by Syau-Cheng Lai at Cornell's Barnes Hall on the third of last February. I was there and I recall that it was a bitter cold night, the wind sounding on the cavernous roof throughout the seventy plus minute performance.

transformations

Spring Pavillion, 2004, Acrylic, ink, pastel, graphite, on silk-applied paper

My review of the two-woman show "Transformations," more or less as it appears in this week's Ithaca Times.

Local abstract artist Syau-Cheng Lai is having a good year. For a week back in early February, her mixed-media on paper installation Visualizing for Bunita Marcus spanned the walls of Cornell's Olive Tjaden gallery. Executed on four long sheets with a bewildering array of drawing and painting media, it was pinned directly to the wall. It effectively interwove moments of sparseness with those of almost dizzying density. It was a definite highlight for local art. Lai is also a noted pianist. Accompanying the installation was her performance of modernist composer Morton Feldman's solo piano piece For Bunita Marcus.

Currently on view at the Upstairs Gallery is a selection of smaller, framed work by Lai. It's an impressive body of work, although nothing quite matches up to her Tjaden installation. In particular, I miss the interplay between its epic length and the close-up intimacy of her mark-making. Nevertheless, their combination of exoticism, playfullness, and rigor is exemplary. Characteristically, most feature a dense layering of eclectic textures—drawn, painted and even carved. A few are more minimal. She is joined by out of town ceramicist Ann Johnston Miller. Although not as diverse or quite as compelling, Miller's work betrays a compatible fascination with her materials.

Evocative of Visualizing—albeit on a much more compact scale—are a series of thin, scroll-like pieces. Due in part perhaps to this compactness, their quality is somewhat uneven. Hung either in an upright, vertical manner or horizontally, they are matted so as to expose the rough edges of the paper sheets. Like the Tjaden piece, looking at these pieces can be akin to reading or listening to music, with a definite if not overpowering feeling of linear sequence.

An upright Shattering Sky features a mottled background of gold and dark brown. Hanging from the upper-right corner are wavy strands suggesting knotted rope or hair. These have been forcefully carved into the paper, revealing white below. In the lower right corner sits a jumble of hard-edged shapes reminiscent of the Louise Nevelson's wood-scrap assemblages - although not for its wide range of hues. Standing beside Sky is Before Sunset. Divided into an intricate arrangement of wavery Klee-like horizontal and vertical bands, the predominantly red, yellow and blue piece has a textile-like quality. Pieces like Upload, Ski Jump and Watermill combine paper-white backgrounds with tighter, more rigidly geometric lines and shapes. These seem overly fussy, as if the artist was trying to make too much happen.

Lai's smaller, more conventionally proportioned pieces have a more immediate impact. They compensate for their lack of breadth with their intensive layering. Her backgrounds are predominantly white, black, gray, red, pink, or gold over-painted with dark brown (the latter are scratched into revealing the color beneath). She often uses vertical and/or horizontal bands—hard edged or soft, thick or thin, visibly layered or opaque—to break up her compositions. Recurring motifs include illegible cursive script (running up and down in columns), Cy Twombly-like scribbles and erasures, dots and dashes, and suggestions of landscape elements such as horizon lines, waves, boats and crescent moons.

Deep Spring is particularly successful. Its horizontal bands of white, greenish yellow, warm brown and red have been extensively worked over with drawn and carved scrawls and loops, small impasto dashes and a blue arrow pointing offstage to the left.

Most of Johnston Miller's pieces combine ceramic vessels with attached nest-like enclosures of grapevine (or in the case of Goddess Eye 3, copper wire). In Transformation, a smooth shiny orb glazed light green is placed inside the opening of a larger matte black blob. The small sphere is insulated with cattail seeds. Drawing - In and Open - Out are simpler: They are light green spheres in their vine enclosures. The long ceramic piece in Natural Dilemma resembles a rounded loaf of bread, right down to its toasted-looking brown color and rough texture.

Also by Miller are two parent and child pieces: the wide, plateau-like Cantilevered Form and the smaller squarish Cantilevered Bud Vase. Similar to Dilemma in color and texture, each has a outline echoing hole in the center. Bud Vase is so named for the smooth light green vessel nested smugly inside.

The Upstairs Gallery is located on 215 N. Cayuga St. "Transformations" will be on view through June 2.

Other Lai pieces in the show include: Red Matrix, White Matrix, and Nuur Resides.

anouncements

Local artist Syau-Cheng Lai will be showing her paintings at the Upstairs Gallery alongside the work of Long Island sculptor-ceramicist Ann Johnston Miller. There will be an opening on Tuesday, May 1 from 5 to 7 in the evening and a "brown bag lunch" the following day at noon. In addition, the Upstairs will be participating in Ithaca's next Gallery Night, which is on Friday, May 4.

Lai's panoramic drawing installation Visualizing for Bunita Marcus was on display at Cornell Olive Tjaden Gallery back in early Feburary. It was quite possibly the best show I've seen by a local artist this year. A video by Miller was likewise a highlight of the recently closed spring show at the Main Street Gallery.

Upcoming at the Main Street is a show of anti-war paintings and mixed-media sculptures by local character Vicky Romanoff. The show opens tomorrow with a reception the day after, from 5 to 8 p.m..

Lai, Shattering Sky, 2005

syau-cheng lai pictures: part four

syau-cheng lai pictures: part three

syau-cheng lai pictures: part two

From section two.

syau-cheng lai pictures: part one

All images are from the first section of Visualizing for Bunita Marcus, a site-specific drawing installation by Ithaca artist Syau-Cheng Lai. More about the project here. More pictures.

visualizing

I just attended an opening for the site-specific work on paper installation Visualizing for Bunita Marcus by local painter-pianist Syau-Cheng Lai. I had high expectations based on what I'd seen (in reproduction) and read about her work and was not disappointed.

Made up of four long sheets of unframed Rives BFK paper pinned to the walls, it covers nearly the entire perimeter of the gallery (minus windows and doors). It contains a rich variety of abstract markings in ink, pencil, pastel, and (oil and acrylic) paint. She uses strong colors—red, orange, gold, bright pink—with considerable restraint. The piece unfolds in a temporal sequence and employs pauses and empty space. I was delighted.

The installation accompanies Lai's recent performance of composer Morton Feldman's quiet, subtle, spacious solo piano piece For Bunita Marcus. I had the pleasure of listening to it last Saturday. A CD recording can be found in the gallery.

The show is up in Cornell's Olive Tjaden Building through this Friday; I highly recommend going to see it if you're in the area. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.. You can learn more about the project and see some lovely pictures in this Times article, and in this piece, from the Urinal.