From a review by Bay Brown- 2000
The show includes traditional materials, as well as alternative ones. “Limiting the show to black and white, it really pares down the materials and choices the artist can make,” said Bakes. “I suppose it is simplifying things, but the question is, does it.”
Of course, the medium of photography most vividly makes the absence of colour apparent. In black and white, images are stripped to their compositions. We see shapes more clearly, textures stand out.
Things become more “architectural, “ meaning an image or a form is abbreviated to its linear and geometric elements. It is like a woman with no make-up — in principal we see into her soul, what she is really all about.
Artist Gerald Auten, who teaches at Dartmouth Collage, used graphite and oil to create abstract drawing that is at once architectural and geometric, with a wide-ranging tonality, shadows and shading, that suggest texture.
Likewise, Marc St. Pierre’s charcoal/graphite abstract also emphasizes the geometry of the composition, but furthermore uses shades of jet black to soft grey, illustrating the vast range between black and white.
Much like Shaw’s comical derby, Suzanne Gauthie’s styrofoam relief depicting running horses interjects humour. It is playful if not sarcastic.
It looks heavy, or at least you expect it to look heavy, because of its thickness, and the great gouges, ripples and lines that form the animals, but it is light as a feather. It takes the classical imagery of the horses and parodies it.
Margret Hlin Sveinsdottir’s oil on canvas has a butter-cream-frosting quality — her work is all about texture and technique. The oil is not painted but formed and chiselled; creating a quilt-like patterned surface that has a sense of serenity, a repetitiveness that is knowable and safe.
The Luscious texture stimulates more than just the visual sense, prompting Backes to call the work “delicious.”