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| Photo By Weston Art Gallery |
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Mary Jo Bole's "History of Penal Institution Sanitation, 2 Views, 2000-01" is on display at the Weston Art Gallery.
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While you and I are having breakfast, indefatigable Mary Jo Bole is no doubt already making art. Or so it seems from looking at her solo show,
Dear Little Twist of Fate, which fills upstairs, downstairs and the janitor's closet at the Weston Gallery, downtown at the Aronoff Center. She just can't stop drawing, sculpting, turning her hand to ceramics, making books.
The Columbus artist has a considerable reputation that has never really reached Cincinnati, so this exhibition -- the fourth in the Weston's series of 10 solo shows celebrating the gallery's 10 years -- serves as a local introduction to her exceptional work.
Bole accepts death as a fact of life in the most natural, indeed loving, way. Dear Little Twist of Fate reminds us that denial, our most recent attitude to the inevitable, has not always been the case. "The generations in my family are yawning and gaping. I am the product of a faded Victorian culture," she says, in explanation of her unfashionable affinity to death.
The day I looked at the show another visitor had a magnifying glass in hand, the better to see Bole's exceedingly detailed work. "Really makes it jump out," he said, brandishing his glass but not offering to lend it. Later, looking at the series "Nipped Buds" (2003-04) and the nearby floor piece, "Great Granny's Mourning Brooch" (2003-05) I could see why his glass helped. The photogenic drawing repeated in two forms in "Nipped Buds" is a curiously straight-edged rectangle of what appear to be frozen blooms, reproduced on 7-by-5 inch oval enamel plaques with background colors straight out of funerary displays: blue, blood, brown, moss. The same image, much enlarged, appears on "Great Granny's Mourning Brooch" and turns out to be neat rows of baby socks. The double whammy is a Bole specialty.
Repetition of images is certainly something to look for here. The artist tries one thing and then another, exploring what works and how it works in different contexts. A drooping image called "Winifred's Lilacs" appears in various enameled color combinations and, flipped four ways into abstraction, in black and white enamel on steel as "Winifred's Lilacs, Quadrant" (2005). In her gallery talk Bole spoke of plants given her by now dead friends and her sense of these growing things as living memorials. Winifred, I think, is remembered through her lilacs.
We see an idea developing over a period of time, 2002 to 2004, in the "Dead Flowers as Incendiary" series, mostly carried out in a medium that might be her own concoction: photo retouch paint, watercolor and coffee. The dead flowers are Queen Anne's Lace, impossibly delicate and gratuitously beautiful. I much prefer the fine-honed drawing skills she shows here to the rough and tumble of color and line that mark her artist's books. Their tossed-off, deliberately clumsy style has been a vogue for some time but is, I think, a mannered, late 20th-century manifestation sure to lose its punch. She is, in fact, meticulous in process. See the use of mosaic in pieces like the bench called "Granny's Necklace."
Aside from a healthy interest in death, Bole has other counterculture pleasures. She finds the swoop and bulge of porcelain toilets voluptuous and gorgeous, and explores this in delightful detail in works displayed in the Weston's janitor's closet. This space has been opened to art at least once before and makes for an intense gallery experience.
Just outside the closet is a wall of working drawings, like the skeleton beneath the show. "You can see that I work for long periods of time on an idea -- and change my mind as I go," Bole told the audience at her gallery talk. Of course. Life is too complicated for quick fixes. Death, too. Grade: A-
DEAR LITTLE TWIST OF FATE is on view at the Aronoff Center's Weston Gallery through Jan. 14.
