Free-Form: Sculpture At Maude Kerns through May 26. BY SYLVIE PEDERSON Ode to HCW #3, steel, wood & paper sculpture by Rex Silvernail Exhibitions focusing on sculpture are unfortunately relatively uncommon. When they do come around, they make us wish for more, as with Free Form: Sculpture at the Maude Kerns Art Center. This juried show features works by a dozen artists from around the country in a wide range of media. Sizes vary from jewelry to room-dominating pieces, genres from abstract to representational. Rex Silvernail's (Washington) wood pieces fully command the viewer's attention. On a raised stage, a giant inverted comma curves through space with the expressive elegance of calligraphy. Then it recreates itself in negative. Viewed like this in profile, Silvernail's Orchatoo imbues line with three-dimensionality while fully exploiting its traditional attributes of width and weight. At the same time, it juxtaposes positive against negative space, a solidity of form against immaterial shape. Walk around it, and the sculpture transforms itself into something altogether different: a golden seed opening and germinating; an abstracted animal form with flaring flanks and snakelike tail; a unicellular organism whose long cillium undulates in rhythmic motion. As the angle of view alters, Orchatoo leads us from the purity of abstract form and clean fluid line to erotic overtones. Persian Gulf 1 (Cornered, No End In Sight) is a three-dimensional line drawing where the line loops around endlessly. "It should have been placed in a corner," Silvernail said, "so as to achieve the pun visually." Combining line and volume in a powerful yet delicate way, Ode to HCW #3 is also about Iraq. It honors H.C. Westerman, a veteran from WW II and the Korean War who later became an artist and denounced the evil of war. Imprisoned within vertical steel-bars, caught in a downward spiral of destruction, a spherical honeycomb of mulberry paper stands for a beautiful but fragile world. Orchatoo, wood sculpture by Rex Silvernail Ritual Behavior, ceramic sculpture by Paul McCoy Pod, cast & powder-coated iron sculpture by Jonathan Hils Probe, nipple, solar cells & electronics sculpture by Randy Polumbo AFS is a memorial to Silvernail's father, whose initials provided it with its title. The inside/outside dichotomy that informs this piece is one of Silvernail's recurrent concerns. "Sometimes the content is more important than the surface," he explained. "My father was strong and rugged on the outside, sensitive on the inside." Reminiscent in form of a Roman milestone or a stylized menhir, AFS appears solid, black and impregnable, contrasting with a polished mandala-like design within. Like Martin Puryear, with whom he shares a definite post-Minimalist kinship, Silvernail constructs rather than carves his sculptures, has studied traditional joinery (in Silvernail's case with artists from the Gitxsan nation in British Columbia, thanks to a Fulbright fellowship) and values craftsmanship. Although he came to sculpture in mid-life only, his work belongs with the better-known.   Paul McCoy's (Texas) ceramic sculptures explore the relationship between highly stylized abstract forms. Color and value contrast provide further formal parameters. This is no mere formalist enterprise, however. Following their titles, which are mercifully brief and to the point, these pieces refer to, and evoke with wit and economy, either real objects (Egg, Socket) or social situations (Encounter 1 and 2 and the particularly delightful Ritual Behavior). Beautifully crafted, McCoy's work is aesthetically extremely pleasing.   Although Jonathan Hils (Oklahoma) uses industrial materials and processes, his airy forms are simple and organic, all of them suggested by means of a lacy metal exoskeleton. Pod is reminiscent of an ancient bottle-shaped vessel lying on its side. Side, a wall piece, might be the missing half of a leaf or a human head.   With Randy Polumbo (New York), we abandon any search for form and aesthetic appeal in favor of quirky kinetic assemblages of unlikely found objects and recycled materials. Six inflated condoms fastened to a small motorized pump move like fat stubby tentacles in a sluggish current (Rover 3). In Manifest II, another inflated condom, tied like a roast and fitted with solar cells and electronics, becomes a blimp in the sky where a Probe also hangs, its rubber nipple armed with a trio of solar cells, its rear-end ornamented with the triple petals of a pink propeller. Delightfully absurdist, Polumbo's work takes its place among the various descendants of Marcel Duchamp.   Hanna Oren-Huppert's (Netherlands) figurative bronze pieces, meanwhile, find their ancestry in the much imitated work of Giacometti. They are likeable, but we have encountered them before.   Some of the works on display seem ill-chosen for this exhibit, as neighboring excellence exacerbates weaknesses that might in lesser shows be forgiven. Thus Mary Russell's (Georgia) ceramic appears too cute and Beth Kennedy's (Montana), in both execution and symbolism, too crude. Jewelry simply doesn't belong here, especially when represented by one lone sample. This mars the unity of the exhibition and would trivialize it were it not for the sheer force of the better works.
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