It’s not that far to Vermilion from downtown Cleveland — half an hour or so west on I-90 — yet it seems much farther, like a quaint slice of Connecticut or Rhode Island transposed to our own low-sodium shore. The lighthouse, the hand-dipped ice cream and the boats are what you would expect. A Chelsea-quality gallery isn’t. Yet that’s what artist/gallerist Sherry Bradshaw has managed to establish in the shell of a former movie theater.
Bradshaw, who moved to Vermilion partly to have access to driftwood
and other shoreline flotsam, makes her art from sticks and bones. Her
studio is in the back of the building, and during the three years of
the gallery’s operation, she has occasionally installed her own work,
which will be display in a show called Digging Beneath the
Surface at FAVA Gallery in Oberlin, opening August 16.
The artseen is a near-perfect New York-style space, with a poured
concrete floor that slopes gently down, opening into a broad exhibition
area like a shallow pool. The transformed movie palace is perfect for
stretching and unwinding art objects, maximizing the relationships
between the elements of a body of work.
At least something like that seems to be happening with
Oberlin-based painter Audra Skuodas’s 18 large, elegantly poised,
deeply emotional compositions now on view there. Skuodas often
achieves a hyper-delicate sense of visual balance as she explores
linear intersection, breach and closure. In the process, she often
evokes musical composition.
At the show Reverberative Pulsations: Vibrational Vulnerability
Series, her paintings are shown singly, as well as in mixed and
matched pairs and triplets, more like visual chords than traditional
diptychs or triptychs. They sweep around the blank room like a song
cycle, not exactly forming a narrative but telling more than the show’s
title would suggest.
Lithuanian by birth, Skuodas spent years as a child following WWII
in displaced-persons camps before emigrating to the U.S. The
figurative images that linger almost invisibly in her largely abstract
compositions — hands, faces, torsos and dancing or crouching
bodies — are elongated like starved shades of social realism’s
well-fed workers. Both ethereal and goblin-like, they hark back to
Eastern European religious art and further, to folk themes that
preceded the establishment of the church. Here they sound harmonies
that mix ancient and modern material, somewhat in the way that folk
themes inform much of Shostakovich’s music or the traditional motifs of
Mahler.
The works on view date primarily from 2002-2007, with one
three-panel work from 1995. None are specifically titled; instead
Skuodas provides a list of 36 thoughts and phrases which viewers are
invited to associate with her imagery. Among these are “The Soul
Recoils Into Infinity,” “Longing Is Proof,” and “The Greatest Evil Is
the Anaesthetized Heart.” As these suggest, Skuodas weaves mortality
into a sublime eternity, creating works of surpassing beauty.
This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2009.