Most of that time the artists spent pushing their limits experimentally as they produced items for this show.
How, then, are we to regard this ambitious amalgam of fine arts, crafts and artisanship produced on state-of-the-art lathes? By realizing that wood turning, as an art, shares with all other types of wood turning the necessity to communicate with a broad - not necessarily an art-smart - audience.
The alliance between populist and postmodernist values that this common ground implies seems virtually unprecedented, as such tastes rarely converge. Even so, the group shows sponsored at area museums by the 20-year-old Wood Turning Center are starting to be fashionably mainstream.
Certainly his stay here provided an opportunity to take a breath of fresh air outside the art tradition for sculptor Richard Hooper of Liverpool, England.
The pieces he shows embrace the romance of technology, ambivalently. Shapes are tense and contradictory. Simple geometric forms grow complex, the result of pristine calculation and his development of a process using ice to support fragile lattice structures while they are being lathe-turned.
Geometry doesn't control everything here, instead giving way to suggested organic forms in Vector Warp, one of the show's finest pieces, its impact a surprise after quiet yet casual contemplation.
The most celebrated of these wood turners is Todd Hoyer of Bisbee, Ariz., who is less self-conscious about formal concerns than Hooper usually is and more subtle and comfortable with his materials.
Hoyer shows pieces about nature, the natural substance of unseasoned wood, and the changes it undergoes in the process of becoming what he makes of it. Hoyer's sculptures here are a visual elegy to the American ash tree.
