By Victoria Donohoe
Matthias Pliessnig’s wooden furniture exhibit at Wexler tells all. The solo display, his first, offers insight into how building and sailing his own 35-pound boat on a Wisconsin lake in the summer of 2013 directly inspired his innovative furniture-making.
The key process he learned from that experience was how to steam-bend wood and air dry it for better flexibility and moisture retention.
Pliessnig’s new work upsets our expectations of what can be done with wood. And that’s because he combines boat-building techniques with furniture-building techniques in a unique blend.
Look again and you’ll begin to recognize this. There’s even a sense here and there of a boat hull shape in certain pieces. Pliessnig uses thin steam-bent strips mainly of white oak to construct his undulating networks of flexible yet sturdy curving seats and sofas that fit the body’s natural contours. Some pieces are one-of-a-kind, others he intends as small editions.
This artist spurns lumber mill and furniture factory methods of shaping wood, preferring to try capturing inherent properties of various kinds of trees, notably white oak’s elastic qualities. He also uses marine epoxy, yet the thousands of points of intersection in each of his seven large works here are what just naturally allow these furniture pieces to keep their form.
Nearly 200 very small, lively, toylike works, “Ad Libs” that he makes from wood scraps and found objects, round out this important display.
Pliessnig, 30, was trained in furniture design and sculpture at art schools in Kansas City and Providence. He completed graduate study under noted woodworker (and Haverford College alum) Tom Loeser at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Now a new Philadelphian, Pliessnig is a familiar exhibitor in group shows nationally.
In these latest works, Pliessnig shares a kinship with everyone who has ever wanted to build his or her own boats. Have a seat as you ponder that one.
Wexler Gallery, 201 N. Third St., Philadelphia. To Nov 1. Tuesday-Saturday 10-6. Free. 215-923-7030.
Two abstract artists
Mary Nomecos and Ron Rumford, two Philadelphia abstract artists, share a handsome show of recent work in the new large exhibition space at the Community Arts Center in Wallingford.Nomecos’ mixed-media paintings on paper are done with a seemingly effortless ease, yet in their mastery they show a fairly complicated sense of the world, and the artist in it. Her moody and far more often lyrical tonalities and a concern with the structuring of light are key ingredients. There’s also an appealing softness that holds hazily to its rectangular format with many translucent veils of color interwoven with understatement and great skill.
Painting of this sort rewards unhurried viewing, and might even win over those who seldom take a serious look at abstraction.
Ron Rumford’s work has a snappy pace and a direct intensity of craft. He seems more aware of his need to cultivate a sense of rhythm that energizes his prints and acrylic paintings than he is of pictorial components.
Surely with monoprints, Rumford finds the right container for his talents. These, in their earnestness, take nothing for granted, and they have as their prime concern shape, texture and process. It’s as if such ingredients are being proposed for further discussion. And Rumford’s printmaking efforts appear in this light as new questioning, not as a response.
Taken from www.philly.com
