| Gnarled branches and splayed tree trunks twist with kinetic energy in Mary Hrbacek’s charcoal drawings, “World Tree Series,” an exhibition curated by Matt Semler, director of the Roger Smith Lab Gallery. A culmination of ten years of experience in tree and figure drawing has resulted in Hrbaceks’ confident prowess in taming the vine medium to actualize complex visual and conceptual ideas. Inspired by metaphors of transformation in the poet Ovid’s “The Metamorphoses,” Hrbaceks’ leafless tree segments seem to reach out or clutch suggestively, hinting at aspects of the human form. |  |
Hrbacek Entwined – Chris Twomey
Gnarled branches and splayed tree trunks twist with kinetic energy in Mary Hrbacek’s charcoal drawings, “World Tree Series,” an exhibition curated by Matt Semler, director of the Roger Smith Lab Gallery. A culmination of ten years of experience in tree and figure drawing has resulted in Hrbaceks’ confident prowess in taming the vine medium to actualize complex visual and conceptual ideas.
Inspired by metaphors of transformation in the poet Ovid’s “The Metamorphoses,” Hrbaceks’ leafless tree segments seem to reach out or clutch suggestively, hinting at aspects of the human form.
From afar, each of the ten black and truncated shapes can read as undulating calligraphic marks contrasting sharply within the confines of the 20 x 30 in. white paper. Upon closer inspection, the shadowed recesses of a growth-like hollow evoke childhood memories of faces in the dark. Flailed bark becomes a woman’s torso and muscular protrusions suggest thrusting muscles or fists. Primitive archetypes lay beneath the surface of the forms, while the mind is encouraged to create fantasies in the dark from the suggestive tonal gradations.
“Entwined,” a literal reading of two tree trunks entwined as one, is both sensuous and sensual. The dusty charcoal moves in tandem with the regenerative and passionate rendering of the trees’ embrace. The surface moves with the artist’s subtle shadings, so that a knotted whorl becomes a demented eye socket or a vortex sucking at a lover’s loin.
A magical forest is conjured; an adult version of childhood memories from, say, the film The Wizard of Oz. There, a forest literally comes alive. Trees grow faces/limbs and use them to pelt Dorothy, Toto, et al with apples from their own branches.
That same sinister duality exists in Hrbaceks’ “World Tree Series,” where nature can turn on man/woman by becoming man/woman-like. Finely honed shapes, which are presented as stately and majestic, turn with a blink into secret and psychic perpetrators.
Hanging these potent totems in the Roger Smith Hotel Lobby Space is delightfully subversive. The customers busily come and go, unconsciously passing the familiar botanicals during their progress. The churning, subconscious life force of the magical trees are poised, ready to encroach on the clients’ perceptions. Like these trees, our human surface resembles the expected; our construct outwardly shows itself by its cover, bark or voice. But, as our ancestors knew with their ancient wisdom as old as the tree, it is the undercurrent beneath the forms that gives us character. It is the subtle perversions and dreams that inspire life.
