Continuing through November 5, 2016
Christine Nofchissey McHorse works with earth in concert with her Dine and Tewa ancestry. She uses thin coil-built walls based upon unchanged, centuries-old techniques that her ancestors, the original Minimalists, employed to ensure the long stability of Tewa culture. McHorse brings tradition forward through elegant, blackened, micaceous clay vessels that curl, flute, and spiral as naturally as nautili. They are the imaginary love children of a merger between Maria “Pots” Martinez and the florid Francesco Borromini.
Fans of tradition will recognize radical variations on established forms like the double-spouted wedding vase, while those in search of rarified contemporaneity will feel like they’ve encountered a new Noguchi, a bolder Brancusi, or a subtly distilled Bourgeois. McHorse walks a fine line between formalist sensuality and eroticism, a hallmark of Bourgeois’ oeuvre. The sense of fecundity among this group of works is overwhelming, but tempered by a rigorous attention to abstract sculptural substance and space. The rich exploration of the vase as both a fixed and flowing form, as both container, and the active space around which the container accretes, demonstrates a formidable, multi-dimensional, and monumentally abstract imagination at play.
