Tony Hepburn at Revolution - 32 years of work represented

In an exhibition that spanned 32 years of art practice, "Tony Hepburn @ 60" revealed an artist speculating on transience and place, distilling the essence of location and relocation through physical objects. As he has moved among different geographic regions, Hepburn absorbs the specific conditions of his environment--from tools to language--and expresses them in works that are ultimately about change.

The exhibition was divided into decades. In the first room the viewer encountered the most recent ceramic sculpture, drawings and digital photos made during Hepburn's 10 years of teaching at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The second space included ceramic and two-dimensional work made while he taught in Alfred, N.Y. The small third room offered several installation drawings and performance photographs from early years in his native England. The shared element is his unconventional transition from three dimensions back to two, as in his drawings of ceramic objects or dramatically lit photographs of early performances weaving together his limbs and torso.

The most recent work in the exhibition, ware cart (2002), encompasses the different methodologies through which Hepburn works an idea. The 5-foot-tall wheeled steel cart with 96 red clay objects on glass shelves was made with the plan to photograph it with a spinning digital camera, replicating the motion of the potter's wheel. Untitled (ware cart), a conte crayon drawing, was executed after the sculpture, and a wood laminate billboard in relief on an exterior wall of the gallery offered another variation. The drawing reads as a motion study on its own, a disjunctive Muybridge of mop tops referencing the classic horse or man in motion but expressing a coiled energy under less control.

The sense of motion and centrifugal force of the potter's wheel is a unifying element of several recent works that begin with hand-built clay letterforms that Hepburn visually rotated 360 degrees. These hand-size volumetric forms are set into containers to take on implications of a child's toy, such as a puzzle (BREADboard, 2000) or pop-apart beads (Bucket, 1998). In Signature (1998), Hepburn addresses the indeterminate spatiality of language and, in particular, the mutability of a name by presenting unglazed letterforms lined up on a shelf plus a highly tactile drawing based on them.

While the subtitle calling this exhibition a retrospective was a bit inflated, it was a rewarding look at the work of a significant artist whose conceptual approach and adept manipulation of diverse materials have translated his experience into cogent "thinglyness."

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