Gabrielle Rossmer

Finding Truth In The Shadows

by Elizabeth Michelman

“Rigid Mobility,” a solo sculpture exhibition by Gabrielle Rossmer at HallSpace, consists largely of open space, broken up by seven polychromed pillars strategically dispersed throughout the gallery. Almost entirely composed of pedestal, they grow upward from a flared foot to culminate at eye-level in stacks of geometric forms pregnant with biomorphic softness. The gallery walls are sparsely punctuated by a handful of shelves holding diminutive representations of body parts.

The focal objects surmounting the pillars appear themselves to be similar to abstract pedestals — bulky towers of angular and rounded forms: bulbous toruses, chunky slabs, oversized hex-nuts, chamfered cubes and chopped-off pyramids. Some of them, composed of repetitions of flattened pyramids alternately pointing upward and downward, quote the endless columns and clashing forms associated with the seminal modernist Constantin Brancusi. The heavy masses and firm contours are occasionally relieved by indentations at the edges, spaces between the elements and flaws in the casting. The continuous painted skin deliberately reinforces a structural ambiguity as to where the “pedestal” leaves off and the “sculpture” begins.

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