San Fransisco Chronicle, 04.30.2011

Jane Rosen's exhibition Wild Life reviewed in San Fransisco Chronicle

By Kenneth Baker

Rosen's "Wild Life" forms: By now, even global warming deniers must have heard that biologists believe some 30,000 species currently go extinct each year, ultimately due to human activity.

Only a perverse artist, we might think, could benefit by working against such an ominous background reality. Yet, Californian Jane Rosen does because her work distills a dumbstruck awe at fellow creatures' existence.

Rosen's work at Braunstein/Quay will surprise visitors who know her art only in reproduction.

Her blown glass, pigmented figures of birds risk looking generic in summoning echoes of earlier sculpture as disparate as that of Constantin Brancusi and of Pharaonic Egypt.

The objects' delicacy and self-effacing craft communicate a sort of reverence along with passion for studio process.

Yet, Rosen also shows herself awake to the strangeness of creatures' differences and autonomy in a series of pieces that stylize hooves into nearly abstract verticals. At times, her work seems to seek essences, but it shows her thinking advancing in several registers at once.

< more gallery news