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Noelle Allen
UBS 12 x 12: New Artists/New Work

June 2 - July 1, 2007

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
220 E. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL 60611
tel.: 312-280-2660
hours: Tue 10a-8p; Wed-Sun 10a-5p; closed Mondays
http://www.mcachicago.org/

In this current offering of the MCA's monthly series UBS 12 x 12, three recent, large-scale works by Noelle Allen swirl with forms that surge, grow, tumble and decay. Teasingly, Allen's delicate organic structures, rendered in freely-handled graphite on long, horizontal swathes of Mylar, hover just at the edge of resolving into representational forms. Trajectories follow the trails of what might equally be leaves, roots, structures of cellular growth or the tenuous filaments of organisms going to seed.

Of the three works on exhibit, The Wintering (graphite on Mylar: approx. 36 x 180 in.: 2007) is best in balancing its free-form structures of turbulent growth and decay with the anchoring element of a geometric arc, on which some of the forms seem to be built, and whose strict curve provides moments of stabilization in the chaos. Spanning the wide picture area, four sections are punctuated by white intervals, like the moments in music when silence holds pause. Each area explores differing qualities of mass, thrust and fragile construction. From left to right, on the left an area of stability flares into turbulence, whipped at the edges with flame-like tongues and filaments of vigorous line. Next, a landscape of delicate structures curls around and upward into a solid twist that forces the movement up, around and back, recurving but not halting the forward motion. In its sudden bloom into sinewy mass, it suggests roots sweeping upward into the trunk of a lichened tree. Further to the right, swooping line directs the motion onward, while at the same time the curved and striated areas find the affinity in form between the delicate curl of decayed leaves and the brittle curve of a bleached jawbone. In the end, while the solid geometry of a drawn arc tries to swirl the focus back into the image, a gentle diagonal of leaf-like forms draws the gaze off to the right, implying an extension of the journey beyond the bounds of the picture itself.

Graphite proves to be a highly plastic medium in the artist's hands, employed more as ink than as charcoal: it runs, smears, smudges, puddles, is occasionally tempered with the subtlest, all-but-invisible washes of watercolor, giving these shapes life and motion on the pale white surface. Across the wide horizontal expanses, the long, almost narrative progressions are reminiscent of a modern abstraction of an Oriental decorative screen. In the end the impression is of a mutation of all things into one another, facilitated by the commonalities of all things: fibers that join, fibers that break, the urge to flourish and burgeon, the inevitable need to die back into fertile ground and begin the cycle anew.

--Katherine R. Lieber

Katherine R. Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net.