Works capture beauty with light
Art: Glenn McNatt
Illuminating reliefs rely on materials

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APR 6, 2004

The steel and glass light-box sculptures of Chicago artist Peter Stanfield also depend for their effect on a subtle dialog between contrasting materials, but in Stanfield's case the exchange also involves language.

Stanfield's works, on view at Gallery International through the end of the month, are about the dual nature of human beings -- as thinking, feeling, sentient beings and as vulnerable biological machines governed by the laws of chemistry and physics.

Each work takes the form of a precisely machined metal enclosure fitted around a fluorescent tube that illuminates various objects in front of it -- vials of colored water, plant stems and other diminutive found objects.

Each enclosure also houses a short, printed manuscript describing the thoughts and feelings of fictional characters who are experiencing various degrees of anxiety, dread or longing.

The highly polished surfaces of Stanfield's enclosures and the rigorously geometric architecture into which their constituent elements are organized evoke the rational scientific world of high-tech machinery and industrial mass production.

By contrast, the printed narratives allude to pitiable psychological and moral frailties all humans are heir to -- loneliness, alienation, illness and death.

It's this eternal, and often tragic, dialog between these two sharply contrasting modes of being -- impersonal, scientific and rational vs. personal, emotional and intuitive -- that gives this work, for all its playful inventiveness of design and construction, an poignant aura of melancholy.

The gallery is at 523 N. Charles St. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Call 410-230-0561.