Sculpture That Touches Spirit

In UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery’s show “Three Dimensions,” all four of the artists included create viable and occasionally rich, intriguing work, but only one makes sculpture that touches the spirit.

Judit Hersko’s work operates on an entirely different level than that of fellow San Diego sculptors Amanda Farber, Tom Driscoll and Lee Boroson. It penetrates deeply into the psyche and the realms of intuition, experience and memory. It is personal, autobiographical, tinged with pain. The others’ work ranges from sterile (Boroson’s pseudo-scientific contraptions) to elegant (Driscoll’s smooth concrete forms), but their works are consistently emotionless.

Hersko’s work from the “Before America” series is based on a handful of old photographs like those that most immigrants keep as reminders of their links to the “Old World.” The photographs are documents--portraits of Hersko’s father as a young man in Budapest or images of the artist herself being walked across a field in Hungary by her older sister. But Hersko has transformed them into powerful, iconic fragments of an irretrievable past.

Images based on the photographs appear in shallow relief on the faces of wax bricks that Hersko has built into small walls. The wax, gritty, flecked with gold specks or silver shards, feels ancient and somehow hallowed. These walls of memories--only a few bricks high and a few wide--appear to be mere remnants, but they are the foundations upon which an immigrant to this country, like Hersko, builds her life.

Hersko also etches the photographic images onto glass, frames them with steel and hangs them on the wall. Light passes through each subtle impression and casts a shadow on the wall, just behind and below the image on the glass. Both the etched and the shadow images are legible, but neither can be fully grasped for they have become, like memories, ephemeral.

Hersko’s works themselves have the tremendously moving quality of memories. They hover between the material and immaterial worlds. They are essential but evasive, distinct and yet delicate, diffused.

Existing in the “real” physical space of the spectator would seem to be one of sculpture’s greatest assets. But Hersko is one of few sculptors today who address real issues in the very real lives that are played out in that space. Many opt instead to finesse issues of representation and abstraction, to exercise their great conceptual cunning, to flex the intellect rather than stimulate the soul. Driscoll, Farber and Boroson are of the latter camp.

Driscoll’s sculpture exudes a powerful presence, but unlike Hersko’s work, that presence is more physical than psychological. Most of Driscoll’s cast concrete, wall-mounted works or free-standing sculptures make oblique reference to familiar objects, and Driscoll seems to revel in the multiplicity of meanings they evoke.

“Incisor” arches gently up one wall, its enamel-smooth surface contrasting vividly with the formless, frothy concrete waves that have solidified along its edges. The long, slender bow of “Casting” refers both to the method of its own production as well as to the like-proportioned fishing pole used for casting of another sort. Driscoll’s snippets of wit are gracefully packaged, attractive and amusing.

Farber’s self-consciously clumsy but charming painted aluminum sculptures play on the crossover identities of animate and inanimate forms. Her “Lily Pad” belies the slight, weightless grace of the real thing for a bulky, oversized construction proud of its rivets and seams. Boroson adopts the trappings of science but to no real verifiable purpose. His use of dry grass seeds and water endows his work with a glimmer of hope and productivity, but his elongated glass beakers and loops of plastic tubing also suggest a malevolent efficiency that has also had its place in science.

Mandeville Gallery director Gerry McAllister didn’t have to look far for these four artists, but “Three Dimensions” is, nevertheless, a broad-reaching show. Each artist offers an independent solution to the challenges of sculpture, for each has defined those challenges differently.

Mandeville Gallery, UC San Diego, through June 16, open Tuesday through Sunday, noon-5 p.m.