Darrell Sapp,Post-Gazette photos Pittsburgh Center for the Arts 2006 Artist of the Year Jane Haskell pictured inside her installation "Edge of Time."

By Mary Thomas
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Jane Haskell consolidates a lifetime of experience into her commendable 2006 Artist of the Year exhibition at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Being exhibited concurrently is an impressive body of work by Kim Beck, 2006 Emerging Artist of the Year.

		Artist of the Year show Where: Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 6300 Fifth Ave., Shadyside. When: Through Nov. 5. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Special events: Jane Haskell and Kim Beck will give Artist's Talks at 6 p.m. Oct. 19. Suggested donation, $5; catalog, $10. Information: 412-361-0873 or www.pittsburgharts.org.

The Artist of the Year is a venerable Pittsburgh tradition that originated in 1949. The Emerging Artist award was instituted in 2001. Both honor excellence in individuals who are also contributing participants in the local art community, many of whom have also exhibited nationally and internationally.

Haskell opens her exhibition with an "Homage to Dan Flavin," an acknowledgment of the influence the seminal neon light artist has had upon her work. The room, illuminated and perceptually changed by color-radiating neon tubes, reflects Haskell's personal application of the medium and calls to mind her permanent "Light Installation," which may be seen from Fifth Avenue. It was commissioned by the center in 1998 and recently refurbished. (A fitting gesture would be to keep it lighted day and night while her show is up.)

Upstairs, the three sculptures of "Fire and Ice" contain chunks of mostly clear glass (cullet) that are flushed with color by neon bands beneath them, causing them to glow like bejeweled embers, their fire changing as one moves around them. Here specifically, the variance of palette Haskell can attain with her lights is evident when one piece is compared to another.

A poem by Robert Frost of the same title introduces this gallery. Like other literary quotes subtly integrated throughout the exhibition, it offers not so much an interpretation of a particular work but a prompt to consider that work within the boundless intellectual and emotional arenas that the humanities afford access to.

"Gobi Desert 1," a photograph by Haskell in the Artist of the Year exhibit. Click photo for larger image.

Then begins a real departure from what we have previously seen of Haskell's expression.

In a dark room, approximately 50 glass globes with fluorescent blue and green markings appear suspended on the "Edge of Time," a mini-universe both mysterious and beautiful. Artists at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, where Haskell recently began taking classes, blew the globes, and Haskell painted them with an element that glows in the presence of the piece's black lights.

Black lights also play a significant role in "Obsessive/Compulsive Progression." Here, the artist has penciled vertical lines upon a long scroll of rice paper that horizontally wends its way down an entry wall and wraps around the four sides of a small gallery. Beginning with one line, Haskell increases the number, generally by increments of one, causing the graphite-darkened areas of the paper to wax as the blank panels between them wane. At a point around 60, she begins anew.

A slow aggregating and releasing rhythm, more like breath than like the regular drumming of a pounding heart, is established, its effect compounded by variances caused by the intensity of the black light illuminating the scroll. The light is fully focused in the gallery's dark recesses, diluted in the entry by ambient light and by light escaping from an adjacent installation.

That installation, "Windborne," is, in contrast, ebullient, its walls awash with festive color and large buoyant kite shapes. Haskell constructed sparse angular forms from hardware-store nails and rope. The flowing lines of color that bring them to life are, surprisingly, not drawn on the wall, but are shadows cast upon it by special dichroic lamps. Haskell has combined two loves and here paints with light.

As "Windborne" is carefree and spontaneous, "Obsessive" is measured and reflective. Paired, they may be read as metaphor for youth and age, beginning in light and fading in darkness, not unlike the seasonal cycles.

The conflation of time and cosmological space in "Edge" and the unrestrained reach of "Homage," up stairways and across lawns, also seem to be observations about human experience. Everything, one might conclude -- including the visitors who walk through the installations -- is comprised of a homogeneous energy that's as diffuse as the light emanating from a sunset, or from a vessel of electrically charged neon gas.

Haskell also exhibits 23 photographs under the title "Born of Sea, Earth, and Sand."

Taken locally and while traveling, the wistful images of landscape, architecture and vegetation share an abstract nature due to cropping and focus on detail. There are no figures. The photographs are given unity by their mounting and by a subdued tonality that's at least in part due to the absorbent nature of the rice paper they're printed on.

Here again the presentation is introspective, the subjects moved from an outer to an internal realm. The moment captured, as vivid as when one first experiences it, is, contradictorily, also already passing. Vitality segues into memory, the image possessing and becoming possessed by the beholder.

Haskell's exhibition is as reflective of the light within as of that without.

Tomorrow: A look at the work of Kim Beck.