Knots & crosses

Bennett and Dombeck at the Clown

By Jenna Russell

“Lisa A. Dombeck’s “Landscapes and Archways,” and Susan E. Bennett’s “Twigs and Splatter,” show through September 30 at the Clown, in Portland. Call (207) 756-7399.

“UNTITLED,” mild steel, linseed oil finish, 8” diameter, 2001, by Susan E. Bennett.

Three or four days into a vacation, after enough hours spent lounging idly in a beach chair, our internal knots start to loosen and unravel. The feeling is akin to a dose of decongestant: a path, an easy route, opens up the head and chest. Susan Bennett’s “snowball sculptures,” at The Clown this month, seem to illustrate that internal uncoiling, while Lisa Dombek’s paintings of portals, hanging alongside, show the passages revealed when knots come apart.

Both Portland artists begin with objects in the world around them. In her recent work, Bennett was inspired by weathered, broken twigs that carpeted a clearing in the woods. Dombek started with man-made architecture, and its deconstruction, in the case of the Million Dollar Bridge in Portland. Both women sought to reestablish order. Bennett toted home a sackful of twigs, sorted and dyed them, and reassembled them in sculptures. Dombek photographed the bridge’s vaults and arches before it was town down, preserving and then reinterpreting the structure in a series of drawings and collages. Both sets of artwork give new life to “dead” objects, most explicitly in Bennett’s “Moon Tree.” Charred-looking twig fragments, harvested from a bed of pine needles on the forest floor, float again in mid-air, wrapped in the wire branches of a large tree sculpture. Composed of steel and wood, the tree looks alive, organic, bent to one side as if by prevailing winds.

Dombek’s painting “Bridge with Birds” also tilts and slides sideways, exposing flashes of the fleshy undersides of its cherry red-toned arches. Space is a gray wash; the birds are charcoal scrawls. In her “Bridge with Crane,” the structure stays upright, maintains its right angles, while pink light glows through rainy violets. The simple relationships of solid bridge-bulk and open space grow simpler still in two “Passageway” paintings. Instinctively, the eye of the viewer seeks the way out of the chaos, finding it between abstract barriers of layered paint, in a door-shaped clearing near the center of the red painting. In the yellow version hanging adjacent, the porthole opening is round and colored a pure, light ocher. The breaks in the surface aerate the paintings, the way time off saws an escape hatch in daily routine.

Expectations and demands, coiled tight and carried uncomfortably in the gut, might resemble the steel balls shaped by Bennett last winter on the forge in her barn studio. Layered like balls of string or coiled barbed wire, once tightly wrapped, the basketball-size spheres are depicted in initial stages of unwinding. Loose ends lift off into space; strands near the center repel one another. The objects’ energies are released, flung outward into the gallery space, and the breeze we imagine feeling as they pass is enough to frame this disintegration as an invitation to new possibility. We long to unwind our own steely snowballs and feel the breeze.

Layers and accumulations are important to both artists. In her collage works, Dombek overlaps paint and scraps of paper until ridges rise like slickly-defined geographical features. Bennett uses her piles of blackened tree parts to echo the patterns and plentitudes found in both nature and industry. “Wrapped Twigs” has stubby wood pieces set in a sheet of rusty metal; the piece is animated and injected with mystery by the shadows dropping underneath the twigs. Gridded equidistant like bristles in a brush, the twigs of “Twig Tree” lean in a uniform slant through holes in a metal plate. It’s as if the forest detritus, once randomly strewn, had been drafted by the military.

Bennett also sketches her twigs, reducing them to cigarette-sized segments splattered with ink and grouped in various minimalist arrangements. These “Twigs on Paper” have no twig properties: they’re hatch marks on an abstract scorecard. Similarly, Dombeck breaks apart the components of architecture in the painting “L’interieur Fracture,” so the arches and supports lose the interdependent identities to which we’re used. Chopped up in a prismatic, up-ended view, their curves and verticals are divorced from familiar function and recast as one-dimensional design elements.

Stripping their subjects down and building them back up in multiple media, Bennett and Dombeck pursue every lead that pops up in their object studies. Along the way there are inevitable missteps, the healthy byproducts of curiosity strong enough to overrule caution. Dombeck’s large “Tides and Moons” lacks the bonding agent that would cement it, and one or two of Bennett’s sculptures obscure their organizing principles under brute force. Both artists include a major work that departs from their primary themes in the show, which may indicate where recent preoccupations propelled them. Dombeck’s large “Phippsburg Scape” is bridgeless, a painting of a winding river, clouds and trees in a spare, airy calligraphy that feels as easy as breathing. The river itself is a kind of visual bridge, showing the way from foreground to distance.

For Bennett, the striking sculpture “Rose of Sharon,” apparently twigless, works as a centerpiece.

Shaped like a dress-maker’s dummy, it’s a life-sized, wire-and-screen torso draped with waxy cloth dyed a blood or barbecue shade. Headless and legless and vaguely disturbing, its surface is pulled apart in places, allowing glimpses through to a vacant chest cavity. Part empty eggshell, part mummy, “Rose” renders the doorway as a physical, bodily opening, with air where the coiled steel knots used to be.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.