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anemone 2002 |
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REVIEWS The Boston Globe . . . Lilly crafts kinetic sculptures out of rods, T-bars, disks, arcs, and tripods. The motorized ones move automatically, but some require the viewer to set them spinning, and they spin so unexpectedly when you touch them it feels as if you're making magic. That's because Lilly, who used to be an architect, builds many different movement mechanisms into each sculpture, and the movement of each element affects that of the next and the whole. Flick one of the two hammers attached to the ends of a T-bar in"Two Magpies" and it somersaults, which sets the second hammer twisting. Touch the work's pivoting platform, and the two hammers do a delicate boogie. Crank the handle on "Shiva" and a T-bar sporting a teeter-totter on each arm rotates; rods lodged in the teeter-totters start to parallel each other. Stop cranking, and the seesaws pump back and forth; the rods splay and close like the legs of leaping ballet dancers. The lines of each sculpture are crisp, the forms simple geometry, but the movement is not at all mechanical. Rather, it has the grace and unpredictability of a feather drifting in the wind. The sculptures and the photographs each stand on their own, but together they create an installation that first, with the photos, takes us out into a giant world of abstract metal, and then, with the sculpture, uses abstract metal to return us to ourselves.
This is a recap of her earlier review, but notable because she listed the show as one of the 10 best in the city that year.
The Boston Herald And explode them. The 10 artists in "Spiritual Geometry," are all intrigued by geometric shapes. Canvases and sculptures are filled with dots and lines, intersecting circles, squares within squares. At the same time, the artworks move beyond the sharp lines and smooth curves to offer meditative or mystical expressions. "This show is based on the idea that paradox - things that at first appear oppositional - can take one to a new level of awareness," said curator Susan Goldwitz, who organized the show. "Geometry is based on strength and severity of line - on mathematical, distinct borders. The spiritual dissolves those borders. These works start with the linear and precise, and move to something that is universal." . . . Kinetic sculptures by Jamaica Plain artist Anne Lilly offer visitors a chance to play with these changing forms. Her interactive metal sculptures dance from one shape to another as the viewer pulls a lever that moves the hinged metal pieces from square to triangle to polygon to square. In Lilly's pendulous sculpture intriguingly titled "Narcissus," two rotating mirrors are forced to eternally face each other as the large-scale metal sculpture methodically rotates, reverses and rotates again. . . . By showing viewers how measured lines lead artists to explore unmeasurable concepts, Goldwitz urges viewers to think about the nature and power of duality, and how the dialectic informs an artist's work. "There is the fertile tension of paradox," said Goldwitz. "These works look at the duality of life. They don't unify it. They push beyond it. We think of things like logic and emotion as opposites, and yet these works are both logical and precise and emotional and mysterious at the same time."
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