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boxed light bodies
Heather Hutchison's work has always stood outside the most common art categories. As much light sculpture as painting, the 3-dimensional shadow box, constructed of plywood and enamel, creates a vision chamber that literally takes light captive and lets it radiate omnidirectionally through the attached Plexiglas surface. Thin layers of wax and pigment, brushed uniformly on the surface, act both to catalyze and diffuse the tempered light, bringing about a deep vibrancy of hue and value. The result is a rare non-coercive, indeed responsive, art form, in which color-luminosity registers the changing natural light specific to any moment of a given day. To experience this is to get a direct and very real sense of the scientific truism that the only constant is change.
In past months Hutchison's work has taken on the charge, but not the figuration, of recent media images, images that are sometimes eerily powerful, of hurricanes, tornados, floods, tsunamis, and earthquakes. Adapting the extraordinary technique that she has invented and perfected, and the visual language carefully honed, over some eighteen years of work, she ambivalently engages energies of natural disasters as fields of force. In this way she explores her own contemporary sublime, defined at once by fatal, destructive power and by invasive beauty. One could say that she marries a post-Minimal approach to an art medium with evolved Romantic concerns — the perilous connections between inner and outer nature.
What really has disaster got to do with art? New Orleans artists may be living this question right now. Hutchison's new work obviously does not pretend to answer such a question, but it does comprise a response out of the foundational principles of her art. What is interesting in this regard is the fact that, while the present show mentions a connection with recent natural disasters, she has been doing essentially the same kind of work for nearly two decades, and not much besides. Such a mono-medial commitment could be considered obsessional, if the basis were psychologically compulsive; simplistic, if the work's apparently narrow premises show a lack of imaginat