Sculpture
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Artist arrests the universe - in bronze
By Christine Temin, Boston Globe Staff, 6/7/2000
Robert Schelling's bronze sculptures usually come across as discrete entities rather than a unified installation. For his show at the Chapel Gallery, though, Schelling has united his small-to-medium works through aural means, collaborating with sound artist David Ison on a score composed for bronze bowls, bells, rainsticks, flutes, and drums. The spare musical composition becomes a three-dimensional though intangible environment, thanks to strategically-placed speakers. The sound encourages you to absorb the room as a whole and make connections among the works as well as inspecting them one by one. The presence and authority of the works also depend in part on their integral bases, some like stepped pyramids, which set each piece off.
Schelling has spent time in India, and is a student of the subcontinent's art, which has profoundly influenced his own in both form and philosophy. He shares the Indian desire to re-create the cosmos. Schelling, in the current show, does so quite literally in works that suggest solar systems or single planets, like "Saturn Element," an orb circled by a ring. "Orbit" is a large, upright ring, like a drawing in the air, studded with seven spheres you could read as planets or pearls. The most complex iconography in the show is in "Ladder," where the rungs are occupied, in ascending order, by a house shape, a snake, a skiff, a hand with palm raised in salute, and another sphere at the top: You could read the piece as an earth-to-heaven climb.
In some works, there's an evident wish to measure time. "Seven Days" is in this category, a round-edged relief with a row of seven dots bulging out from the pillowy shape. The central dot is larger than the others, and slightly set apart, as if this were a day of special significance. Shields, musical instruments, seeds, spiky crowns, lotuses, and numerology also factor into Schelling's sculptural vocabulary. Among the most pleasing works in the show are two "Table Bells," vessel-shapes on their own elevated stands, with mallets that slip through two bronze loops on the side. One bell, tuned to a D note, has a dark patina; the other, tuned to an F note, has a luscious, scratchy, coppery finish. One thing that makes these works so satisfying is the richness of Schelling's surfaces; another is that you're allowed to touch the sculptures (gently) and to play the bells, contributing your own long-lasting note to the existing soundtrack.
In addition to Schelling's bronzes is a small selection of black-and-white drawings, each composed with as firm a hand as the 3-D works. "Umbrella Bells," for instance, is a pole with a trio of inverted-bowl shapes, smaller as they get higher, like the tiered roofs of a temple.
Both Schelling's "Elements/Composites" and the group show are on view at Boston Sculptors at Chapel Gallery, 60 Highland St., West Newton, through June
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201 Putnam Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, (617) 864-8401, schelling@hughes.net
307 Hickory Ridge Road, Putney, VT 05346, Tel: (802) 387-2230, Fax: (802) 387-6082