Over the past year or so, Gallery Joe, a premier exhibition space for both drawing and sculpture, has featured an impressive new series of drawing shows. Now, owner and director Becky Kerlin has produced two concurrent shows of the excellent sculpture on which the gallery’s reputation is based. Kerlin selected new work by the accomplished Philadelphia sculptors and longtime Gallery Joe stablemates Todd Noe and Jeanne Jaffe, who share a propensity for well-conceived and well-constructed work. Both artists, in their own way, blend a sense of sculptural craftsmanship with a sense of humor. Kerlin is also featuring Leap of Faith, an enormous, mixed-media hanging sculpture by Ron Klein, in the gallery’s outdoor Bird Park exhibition space.

The title of Noe's exhibition, "Observatory," installed in Joe's front gallery, gives the viewer a hint that the work is about seeing -- a surprisingly unique theme in the world of contemporary visual art. Noe employs his vocabulary of miniaturized objects, such as trailers and boats, in four new sculptures that explore the placement and observation of forms. Made of fabricated bronze and brass that have been subdued with a satiny dark patina, these little objects are precisely made, with a jeweler's sensitivity. The show also includes six drawings, all studies for aspects of the sculptures.

The largest of Noe's sculptures, Observatory, is made up of a row of 11 tiny objects placed on little shelves at about shoulder height. They are not models or sketches, but rather real things from the real world, only smaller. Included are a flagpole, a boat, a carriage, a cradle, an archery target, a trailer, a microscope and a wheelbarrow fully loaded with miniature bricks. Mounted high above these small objects, along the length of the wall, there's a horizontal metal rod. An adjustable magnifying glass hangs from the rod, which can be moved back and forth (theoretically) down the length of the wall and adjusted to the proper angle, allowing the viewer to closely examine each component. (I wondered: Could I subject my workmanship to such scrutiny?) In a humorous blend of scientific investigation and metalworker's alchemy, this ingenious contraption allows the tiny objects to be seen at something closer to their real-life scale.

Another impressive wall sculpture, The Sheltered Observer's Search for Balance, continues the theme of looking. Within a rectangular frame of square, bronze rods, Noe has created a sparse and flattened diorama, like a set for a drama or a dream. All of the parts are machined, bare and filled with longing. Inside the frame, a shelf mounted on the wall holds a miniature telescope, while near it a ladder leads downward. Attached to the frame at several points around the perimeter, other little objects, such as a pocket watch, a rowboat and a unicycle balancing a chair and an umbrella, add to the drama. The piece is autobiographical -- in symbolic, not literal terms -- and reveals the artist's travels in life, his search for balance, and his midlife perception of time's passage. The Observance of Ritual, another framed wall construction, brings humor back into the mix. An assortment of ritualistic objects, including a Manhattan glass with an oversized cherry (with a stem like a fuse!), a tidy stack of miniature bronze sugar cubes, a quill pen, and other odds and ends, give a tongue-in-cheek summary of life in the early 21st century, mixed with a little nostalgia. These framed wall pieces conjure up a poetic vision out of an array of ordinary objects and mark a new direction in Noe's work into a larger scale and a more pictorial approach.

On display in Gallery Joe's Vault Gallery there's a new body of work by Jeanne Jaffe, known for her sculptural work in handmade paper. The show includes 12 monoprints from 2001, along with a group of recent bronze and resin sculptures, which were made in 2002. Jaffe's attractive prints (all untitled and 17 inches by 20 inches) were made at a residency last summer at the Printmaking Council of New Jersey, and they have layers of transparent colors in a sort of '50s palette, mainly subdued pinks and browns. The imagery in the prints -- organic shapes floating over textured and patterned backgrounds -- also brings to mind the 1950s. Pristine shapes resembling internal body parts, such as kidneys, ovaries and intestines, abound. Some prints are understated, like Untitled No. 1, which shows two gossamer ovary-fallopian-tube forms on a pale pink background. Others, like Untitled No. 9 and No. 14, are much livelier. In No. 14, red, orange, slate blue and pink forms jostle over a background of irregular white spots on pink, while No. 9 has two patterned chine collé organic forms layered over a bright (French's Mustard) yellow ground.

Jaffe's six sculptures in the show, with wonderfully full, organic forms, are even more appealing, especially her small, lusciously tactile bronze pieces. Mutable Object (5 by 9 1/2 by 5 inches), a creased, rounded form with bulbous protrusions, is evocative of genitalia. Its chalky-white patina is highlighted with metallic rose and pinkish-peach, and it appears flushed and erotically aroused. Twin (3 1/4 by 6 1/2 by 8 inches) evokes an exotic split-open fruit with a dark exterior and a pale, sensuous interior, while Mutable Object No. 2 (4 by 5 by 3 1/2 inches) is like a truncated little personage with its tongue stuck way out. A large and ambitious cast-resin piece, Progeny (dimensions variable), is made up of one large unit and three smaller offspring, all painted flat slate gray with peach and carmine-pink extremities. Though the material lacks some of the appealing tactility of the small bronze sculptures, it's understandable that Jaffe would want to explore the forms in the larger scale that this medium allows, and the grouping of the forms points to an interesting direction in her new work. Progeny, and Jaffe's other new work, can be appreciated as a sophisticated investigation of modernist sculptural and formal praxis à la Miró and Giacometti. But best of all, Jaffe's prints and sculptures express a lusty joie de vivre, while offering a delightfully optimistic vision of what's inside us humans.

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September 23, 2004
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