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During her artist’s talk at the T.W. Wood Gallery in Montpelier earlier this month, Mary Admasian thanked her friend and fellow artist Rob Hitzig. He had offered her the scraps from his woodshop to use as kindling. Instead of burning the bits of plywood and veneers, Admasian transformed them into a new body of work she calls “Scraps With Nature.”
The show brings together 31 pieces — 14 of them made this year — of small sculptures and reliefs, as well as a few works on canvas. Most are assemblages. Admasian doesn’t carve or shape as much as collage in space. Stratified layers of plywood integrate with hardwood; bits of barbed wire and saw blades stick out at angles; glass beads and gems are tiny surprises in nooks and crannies.
Admasian’s palette — largely restricted to natural wood, black and white, and the shockingly bright blue used to flag trees for cutting — helps make this show cohesive. The sculptures are compact; most could be comfortably held in two hands. Their many details should be seen up close.
Admasian experiments with composition. Works such as the trio called “On Edge” direct the eye with graphic lines in paint, which lead to lengths of wire that in turn point to the sharp edges of plywood scraps. It’s like a pinball game for your gaze.
“I love composition,” Admasian said in a recent conversation. “I love to compose objects in art in a way that gives you a different experience that you don’t have every day.”
That experience is rooted in abstraction, but the materials Admasian uses bring their own set of meanings to her work. The plywood is obviously manufactured, down to the stamped markings visible through the painted surface of “Cutting.” Elements such as broken band saw blades also seem to reference the often-destructive act of construction. Along with her signature bright-blue paint, a deep, tannic yellow stains the wood in pieces such as “Overflow.” The color and saturation of the grain is sunny yet perhaps signifies decomposition, decay or pollution.
Admasian, who has used barbed wire in different forms for years, carries it from earlier canvas works into her recent sculptures. In “The Well,” “The Divide” and “Black and White,” barbed wire is the main focus. An aggressive barrier to the viewer, it conveys emotional weight.
Social and psychological challenges, including racial violence and mental health, were top of mind when Admasian created the pieces five to 10 years ago as part of her “Boundaries, Balance and Confinement” series. In her newer body of work, barbed wire plays a different role.
While it is prominent in assemblages such as “Marked and Descending,” its function is more visual and less symbolic; the wire is a graphic element leading into the structures of the piece, poking out, interrupting. Noticing it is more like finding snippets of barbed wire embedded in a tree than confronting a whole fence. The menacing snags are still there but are partially hidden.
Admasian’s reliefs and sculptures are architectural and organic, like postmodern fairy houses. They’re full of little visual gifts and secrets. “Pearl on Deck,” which suggests a ship seen from above, rewards a viewer standing on tiptoe to spy its blue top and edges; there are interesting notches and angles not visible from the front. A tiny pearl fills a void in the plywood.
Likewise, “3 Gems” offers up not only delicate pyrite bits but also thin, graphic lines that are actually the delineations of spalting — a fungus that creates black edges within the maple’s grain. This piece in particular plays with the contrasts in scraps — the heft of a tree, striations of plywood and milled molding are three very different permutations of the same thing.
The contrasting materials work particularly well in small doses. Admasian uses a sparkly polymer of glass beads sparingly but to great effect in pieces such as “The Offering,” the most recent work in the show. It pairs a yellow slab and smaller chunks of veneer with a dollop of glass beads and a single pearl. The latter becomes a focal point, in conversation with a tiny blue shard.
Elsewhere, the glass beads look like some kind of arboreal fungus. In “Underwater Bow,” the edge of the wood coated in glass beads appears to be melting. Elements such as the found color in “Pink Line” — already present when it hit Hitzig’s trash pile — offer additional surprises and visual quirks.
Seeing Admasian’s work in a solo presentation is rewarding. The sculptures talk to each other on the wall, pointing back and forth, each with its own personality. Similar scraps seen in new permutations form different conversations. There are a few outliers, such as “Orbiting the Red Ball,” a 6-by-6-inch canvas tucked behind the Wood gallery’s piano. Materially, it connects Admasian’s latest efforts with her past projects.
The Montpelier artist thinks deeply about relevance and resonance when making these works, and her feminism and environmentalism are at play. Those influences inform a visual language that is all the more effective for being indirect; there’s no overt message.
“A lot of it is intuitive — how these pieces are speaking to me and how I interpret that narrative, whatever it is,” Admasian said. “It may have a political component to it, but I would like the viewer to arrive at that themselves.”
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