Really unreal

Josette Urso finds the fantasy in reality

by Leon Nigrosh

JOSETTE URSO

at the Hammond Art Gallery, Fitchburg State College, 160 Pearl Street, Fitchburg, through January 5, 2001.

While most of us struggle through our mundane reality, seeking solace in TV or Play Station 2, or escaping to the paintball field for a few moments of fantasy relief, New York City artist Josette Urso slips easily back and forth between fantasy and reality through her landscapes and collages. Dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans (as was this writer) the tall, slim painter glided almost soundlessly through the L-shaped space as she arranged 28 artworks for display at Fitchburg State College's Hammond Gallery.

Guiding the tour in reverse chronological order, Urso first showed us her most recent series of paintings and then slowly brought us back to her earlier fabric collages. With the help of a grant from the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Urso recently had the opportunity to spend seven weeks in County Mayo, Ireland, where she was initially completely overwhelmed by the rugged landscape. "It was so different that I didn't even feel like myself for the first two weeks," she reports.

But she persisted, going into the field every day and painting en plein air, huddled against the changing weather and learning to capture the changing light in a series of small oil-on-paper-on-wood panels. In the dozen works from this grouping, we can almost feel the chill winds and damp atmosphere; Urso plays with many shades of deep green, generating the dark planar shapes of the craggy coastline. In her 9x12-inch Active Cove, she melds the land and sea with flat, low-key color, while the equally small Lacken Strand/Storm is little more than shades of green separated by a thin horizontal line. But simplicity such as this is more than enough to give us a sensation of the wilderness Urso tried to tame with her brush.

On the opposite wall are a half-dozen matted and framed oil-on-paper works that Urso completed while she traversed the equally rugged mesas of Arizona on an earlier extended trip. Here the colors are brighter, the touch is lighter, and the images are somewhat more recognizable -- as in Cactus Path and Close Cactus Path, both lively with yellows and ochres and peppered with penciled cacti.

When not traipsing around the world grappling with reality, Urso is holed up in her NYC studio where she has devoted her time over the past two years to making fantasy circular collages. These deceptively simple geometric circles within squares are, in fact, painstakingly constructed from myriad bits of cut paper -- gleaned from a 20-year collection of source material, including drawings she'd made back in seventh grade. Originally, Urso created these 20-inch diameter circles from snippets of colored patterns, magazine pictures, color Xeroxes, and miscellaneous images (like the swimmers, hands, and ants incorporated into Twist Again). More recently, she has been draining away the color and concentrating on the arrangement of patterns such as the images of birds and trees in Cloud.

Two 30x28-inch works from Urso's Grid series of primitively decorated handmade paper collages serve as a bridge returning us to her earliest works in this exhibit. Hands, feet, lemurs, and ants abound in these works -- all indications of Urso's ideas of "inner landscapes" and imaginary places where animals and humans are interchangeable.

The largest, and most bizarre, works on display are Urso's fabric collages from the early 1990s. Giant anthropomorphic polka-dotted rabbits rule in the 8x7-foot Jannaia, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of faux pearls and buttons and things and stuff -- all sewn onto a truly crazy quilt of clashing color swatches and samplers. Three leopard-skin creatures are front and center in the mostly red, five-foot-square We Three, while a fabric-store printed owl emerges from the near chaos of the aptly named collage, The Owl.

As we retrace our steps from Urso's beginnings to her most recent works, her interest in portraying the complexities of life, her curiosity about the phenomenon of "nature and man colliding," and her attempt to organize these thoughts into meaningful dialog all become more obvious. Through her collages, she manages to produce narratives; simultaneously she remains cryptic so as not to give away any answers. Her landscapes have matured to become much more about place than about pure artistic interpretation. And in attempting to create this balance between fantasy and reality, she presents us with a wonderfully imaginative and dynamic array of images that captivates our attention and provides much food for thought.

The Hammond Art Gallery is open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., on Friday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., on Saturday from noon to 6 p.m., and on Sunday from noon to 9 p.m. Call (978) 665-3162.