Harriet Matthews at Colby College Museum of Art - Waterville, ME

A professor of art at Colby College since 1966, Harriet Matthews has distinguished herself as a sculptor with handsomely fabricated steel works. During a sabbatical spent on the island of Samos in 1987, she fell in love with the landscape and the architecture of Greece; since 1995, Athens has been her base of operations. The 50 or so pieces in "Recent Drawings and Sculpture" date from the past six years and relate directly to those sojourns abroad.

As much an engineer as an artist, Matthews works from wax models and sketches, assembling her floor and pedestal sculptures out of ingeniously interlocking elements (only one screw was visible in the entire show). Geometric shapes, classical columns, shrines and sets of zigzagging stairs are combined with stylized landscape elements, such as rocks, a river, fields and mountains. Curves felicitously play off straight edges. She uses an alkyd oil paint to color the steel works.

In Mountain Village (Mondanistika), 1999, Matthews recreates a precipitous setting, with a roadway spiraling down like a waterslide from a village of small blocks. The dynamic recalls that of Tatlin's famous Constructivist tower, only more volcanic in feeling and with the sense of generative movement inverted. Fields below Kalohor, I and II (both 1997) are balancing acts, with green-gray fields held aloft by steel supports, bringing to mind the mythical places described in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Similarly, in its stage-set quality, Travel Piece I (2001) recalls a de Chirico painting. A set of columns is painted a light silver, while other sections have a dark patina not unlike mahogany.

The show included three exquisite small bronze reliefs with walnut stands that incorporate classical landscapes and female figures, and 16 miniature bronzes (the smallest a mere 3 1/2 inches high) inspired by monasteries, temples, landscapes and ruins in Greece. Several of the miniatures (all 2000-01) feature caryatids holding up the mountains and temples.

The second segment of the exhibition was devoted to 20 graphite-on-paper drawings of the Greek countryside and rooftops and courtyards in Athens. The hand is relaxed yet deft at rendering tiered hillsides and cisterns. The relationship between drawings and sculpture is apparent, but so is the imaginative distance Matthews travels between the one and the other.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group