The upper sections are octagonals which, If doubled, bring us back to hex again: sixteen.
The word "hex," in addition to designating the number six, also carried the meaning of sorcery, a jinx. And these sculptures are, as their resemblance to ancient totemic forms also suggests, sources of visual bewitchment, shimmering In optical craftiness. As the viewer moves around the works they assume different shapes. From certain positions they appear as irregular octagons or hexagons. Other views reveal rectangles, pentagons, or slightly askewed squares. Seen as such, the sculptures become drawings in space. Their shapes expand, segmenting and delineating sections of the areas they occupy. They provide frames for portions of their surroundings, frames, however, whose shape and contents are constantly modified by the slightest motion of the viewer. Yet this is only one aspect of the structures. Seen from certain other stances they collapse into jagged columns in space. In some instances one of their halves will remain as "drawing in space," while the other portion will function as sculpture in the round. Even after several viewings one is never quite certain of the shapes the next angle of vision will produce. The sorcery is in the ease with which these sculptures can be understood and the difficulty in the actual seeing of them. With every move they frustrate anticipations and compel revisions.
The treatment of their surfaces adds to and emphasizes the constant change that is the seeing of them. The flat planes are ground and polished to a reflective subversion of their materiality. They exist in the unreliability of flicker. In Changeabout, Herbert Simon's most recent sculpture, the lower portion is made of weathering steel tubing, a departure frorn the aluminum of its upper portions, and of all his other works in this exhibition. Here the artist has incorporated a material that not only will change as it is being viewed, but one that will also change in time, weathering in perhaps unpredictable ways. Future time is added to the complexity of fully knowing the objects in present time.
Although the work of Herbert Simon, like that of Adrienne Bordes, Lawrence Fane and Susan Groehl, explores the mutable Intricacies of seeing and the unreliability of assumed systems, neither he, nor the other three artists, despair such complexities, Their work reveals no regret for the absence of set assurances. Rather, in different ways, all of their paintings and sculptures exhibited at Federal Hall emphasize and celebrate the possible fullness of moments of being in the present.
JULIA BALLERINI
