“Shredded Art
DEC 31
THE NARROW THREAD THAT LINKS THE WORK OF Tory Cowles and Rosa Inés Vera is a shared interest in decorative traditions. The two local artists, who have adjacent shows at Touchstone Gallery, mostly explore territories that are far distant from each other’s. The former’s “Serendipity: A Dance Between Painting and Sculpture” juxtaposes neo-abstract-expressionist canvases with found-object assemblages, while the latter’s “Resilencia” consists of portraits, generally archetypal rather than specific, of Latin-American women.
The most prominent pieces in Cowles’s show are four large abstract paintings that are multi-colored but dominated by the hues of sunlight and night: yellow and black. These pictures aren’t exactly sculptural, but they do have abundant 3D features: thick impasto, heavily worked surfaces, craggy textures, and collaged bits. So it seems apt that the artist would deconstruct other of her paintings into mobiles, folded eccentrically and suspended in midair.
Perhaps the most successful of Cowles’s hybrids is “Explosion on the Cabin John Bridge,” a shredded black truck tire that’s painted yellow and orange and hung on the wall. Roughly circular, “Explosion” is a particularly dynamic sort of action painting, and echoes the color schemes of the other pictures…