Sneeze frame

Heide Fasnacht's explosive collection

by Leon Nigrosh

BLOWUP: RECENT SCULPTURE AND DRAWINGS BY HEIDE FASNACHT
At the Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury Street, through June 4.

The Worcester Art Museum's contemporary art gallery is simply bursting with energy. Indeed, in her first solo project, WAM curator Susan Stoops has assembled 24 dynamic drawings and sculptures by New York artist Heide Fasnacht, who explores notions like seeing the unseen, making the temporary permanent, and integrating the empirical with the artistic -- and all because of one, routine sneeze.

Fasnacht's interest in capturing the ethereal on paper stems from her readings about Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor R. L. Soslo and his cognitive research on rapid eye movement. Soslo tracked the eye movements of volunteers as they looked at a picture of George Seurat's (1859 to 1891) delicately colored pointillist painting Les Poseuses. Using his diagrams, Fasnacht then made her own Rapid Eye Movement series, consisting of seven graphite drawings in which she connected dots to show where the viewers' eyes had once rested. Some areas were "viewed" so often that she actually poked holes in the paper. These works are more than mere scientific references; they suggest imaginary star clusters and have their own compositional strength.

From these works, completed in 1997, Fasnacht then represented eruptions and explosions. The 40 by 60 inch drawing Sneeze focuses on the fulminating spray of sputum (don't you love the word) spurting from the subject's mouth. The spray, made up of hundreds of black Benday- like dots, is funny at first. But then, fear of contagion sets in. Unsatisfied with a two-dimensional image of this everyday occurrence, Fasnacht's employed bits of black polymer clay and wire to produce Little Sneeze and Sneeze, both of which spew dangerously outward from the gallery walls.

Newspaper photos have inspired many Fasnacht works. Take her large 1998 Human Volcano, which is practically the opposite of her sneezing character. The former picture is laden with thousands of closely spaced graphite dots that create an attractive image of a fire- breather who blasts flames toward his viewers -- and provides an interesting scientific phenomenon. Because the dots' placement contrasts with the white paper, an unintended optical illusion called "expectation of color" occurs, producing pale-yellow rivulets throughout the drawing.

Because Fasnacht continues to work on such meticulously rendered drawings as Bombing, a ground- hugging blast with roman-candle contrails, she's begun to construct smaller sculptures, including the black-and-white polymer clay and steel version of the same blast, complete with spidery pyrotechnics. Another freestanding polymer clay-and-metal work is Eruption, a small- scale version of an erupting black volcano belching an ever- expanding cloud of smoke. Anyone who's actually witnessed such an event knows the catastrophic terror involved. But when presented as a tabletop miniature, we can admire the asymmetrical composition and aesthetically arranged volumetric forms.

As Fasnacht pursues her goal of halting instantaneous actions, she also explores mediums that might better capture these moments. By spraying urethane foam through wire-mesh ammatures, she can watch (and, to some extent, control) a slow-speed eruption while the plastic expands and hardens. To preserve the amorphous, bulbous forms, as well as to impart a solid appearance, the finished objects are given several coats of bonded metal. The iron skin covering the mushroom clouds of Volcano I and Pinatubo lend a steely-grey look that adds to the visual weight of these once-mighty "clouds."

More recently, color has appeared in Fasnacht's catastrophe drawings. Her 40 by 60 inch Forest Fire is ablaze with a spectrum of hues in both the raging inferno and the perishing timberland. Just like her earlier graphite-dot drawings, each colored pencil mark is sharp -- a sign of laboring almost to the point of obsession. Fasnacht, in fact, took months to complete this work, as well as her equally impressive blue-and-white Blue Pinatubo.

The exhibition's centerpiece is also the latest of Fasnacht's forays into the realm of urethane, bonded metal, and eruptions. Finished just in time for this exhibit, Big Bang is a six- foot-tall detonation of bubbling, bizarre shapes that coalesce into a representation of unbridled, yet frozen energy. It seems that as the scale of Fasnacht's work increases, so, too, do the possibilities. Perhaps her future drawings and sculptures will express even more dramatically the same sense of natural energy that the current, remarkable collection does.

The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call 799- 4406. Heide Fasnacht will speak about her work on Thursday, April 27, at 7:30 p.m.