Another worthwhile three-dimensional show, Confront/(A)Void, a Joseph Shaeffer solo, is on display at Artyard Contemporary Sculpture. Shaeffer is a young, self-taught sculptor from Boulder who has gotten a lot of attention for his magnetic and suspension sculptures over the past few years.
In some ways, his work at Artyard breaks from those types of sculptures, since it looks nothing like them Conceptually, though, the two are connected, because both focus on voids. In the older works, it was the spaces in between the forms where the magnetic fields acted, typically holding the forms of his sculptures apart from one another.
"Granite Resting Stones," by Jerry Wingren, Swedish black granite.
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Another way the "Void" pieces relate to Shaeffer's earlier work is the way all three types use the laws of nature as a topic. Shaeffer has written that he began the new series with drawings based on satellite images of geological formations of depressions. To render them, he first cut out heavy paper stock and layered it one sheet on top of another, resulting in the effect of a three-dimensional topographic map. There are some of these cut-paper versions at Artyard, but they are overshadowed by the larger and more substantial pieces that take up the same theme.
For Shaeffer, the physical voids in nature that led to the "Void" works, including the aforementioned paper constructions, have narrative content. The actual voids — holes within the pieces, or representations of holes — are meant to represent psychological voids. More than that, Shaeffer sees the physical voids in his works as actually filling the psychological voids, apparently his own. This means that the "Voids" are also an unlikely take on the self-portrait tradition, despite there being no figural elements in any of them.
The most impressive is "Void 19-718 (Void Confront)," hanging right inside the front door. Shaeffer has taken black plastic tubing and looped it together into a half-dozen soft ovals. The ovals are in different sizes, with the largest up front and the smallest at the rear, forming a loose and truncated cone. These loops have been covered with black plastic strapping ties that are mounted at an angle like hairs sprouting out of the tubes and covering the overall form inside and out. The entire thing has been hung from the ceiling so that the lined-up openings in the ovals — the void — is at eye level.
A subtle feature of "Void 19-718" is that it is installed so that when viewers peer through the central opening in the suspended form, they see the acrylic-on-canvas painting "Void 02-07," and the actual aperture in the hanging sculpture lines up perfectly with the rendering of an opening in the painting. It's a very nice effect.
It's always a risk for artists to set out to change their established paths because of the danger that they may lose their way. Although Shaeffer has gone a new direction, he's kept his work going strong and on the same trajectory.
