Review of exhibition "Beyond Belief" / Chatham College Art Gallery / Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette / Tuesday, April 8, 2003 / Arts and Entertainment
Terry Slade
The stone circles, cairns and burial chambers of England, Scotland and Wales have been the subject of artist Terry Slade’s "quest" for four years, an activity that he considers as much a part of his artwork as the drawings and sculpture that are inspired by the ancient monuments he visits.
"Beyond Belief," an exhibition at Chatham College, is an unexpectedly bright, otherworldly fantasy centered by the installation "Point of Departure," a circular ritualistic space that includes dangling white-painted roots and Pyrex glass ladders suspended over a brass foil sun-like form that challenges notions of up and down, beginning and end.
Ladders-long a religious reference to transcendence and more currently linked with the discovery of DNA-permeate the exhibition, as in the fine digital print triptych "Past-Present-Future." In it, one floats against a color-streaked sky between panels that show a circle of stone and what may be a nebula, connecting man with infinity. For Slade, they also "allude to travel and change" and express such notions variously in cast glass, bronze and iron.
Most arresting is a wall of abstract acrylic paintings on paper of the monument-studded landscapes he’s traversed, emboldened with shimmering colors like the auras revealed by Kirlian photography. Whether or not those were in his mind as he painted, Slade says he "strongly believes that the presence and sounds of all the people who have made or visited these sites throughout time remains within their sphere…" It’s part of what drives the journey.
Review by Mary Thomas
Post-Gazette Art Critic