JO SANDMAN;
RELIEF IN BLACK
AND WHITE
There is something so clean about Sandman's work it could be sterile, but it's not. It could be without flavor, but it's not. It should just be an ongoing rehash of Minimalist concerns, but it's not. Why? What about the formal gymnastics? What about the severe limitations, the chilly control? Sandman doesn't care. What she is up to, what she is messing around with in her very unmessy way is the poetry of form. It has its roots in the aesthetic revolution of the Twentieth Century: abstraction. That is a given. It is the formal abstraction of Malevich and Mondrian, Leon Polk Smith and Barnett Newman. It is also the abstraction of print, and design. Clean, crisp, hard edge, black and white.
But these things happen to be something that Sandman only shares; a language; a second nature; a sensibility that she understands, a world that makes sense to her. What she does, the way she uses her materials, her own sensibility, is evidenced in the work, and it is there. It is hers.
How this work sits, how it is centered, how it turns on that center, that is what she's up to. What can happen? Were can she go? Left, right, in, out, up, down. Each one of the pieces is a different path, something on the other side of one door on a hallway of many doors. This is not gymnastics, or even inquiry, it is instead a process of expression and discovery, a way of finding out what can be, how it can feel, what it can mean. To her.
These works are reliefs, they flow in the middle of a pristine white horizontal plane of museum board. The scale is such that if lain flat they could be architectural models. Sandman portions segments of black rubber hose against simple cut plaster shapes. The plaster is pure white like the paper, but softer, cooler and dryer. The rubber is black like a piece of text, but dull and greasy. The plaster is brittle, the rubber resilient. The rubber can hold the plaster. It can be the mold.
There Is no denying the satisfaction that this artist gets from what she is doing. It makes the work equally satisfying. Jo Sandman is the meticulous composer. The Hoffmans and Rauschenbergs may be her background, but there is not that kind of bombastic lust for expression in what she is doing. No, her spirit seems to belong more with peers like Richard Tuttle, a generation with a desire for a more precise, less aggrandized, more subtle, less self-indulgent expression - artists uncomfortable with even the idea of expression. And not necessarily minimalist or reductivist either, but as accurate, measured, and conservative in the best sense. (Tuttle was at one time obsessed by Japanese culture, and Sandman displays at least similar tendencies.)
Coming to terms with Sandman's work, you don't. Despite all of the controlled form, the work is profoundly irrational, non-rational, and secret- stubbornly senseless in the great Modernist tradition. The ultimate. Not art for its own sake, but for no sake at all. Beneath that you discover the emotional bedrock of this work. Of Jo Sandman. Her pieces are the polished stones washed up by the water's edge.
Sandman is a Boston artist. She teaches at The Massachusetts College of Art, and works in Somerville. Her work is handled by Andrea Marquit Fine Arts at 38 Newbury St in Boston, and O.K. Harris Works of Art in NYC.
Addison Parks, 8/8/94, Cambridge
Exhibition Essay, O.K. HARRIS Works of Art, NYC; 1994
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