ARTWeek Review: Jane Rosen at Braunstein/Quay Gallery

Jane Rosen's talent is in finding the shadows of things, the soft sepia tones of birds and mammals, the quiet and penetrating turn of a beak or gaze of a feral eye. Her recent show at Braunstein/Quay Gallery was a muted collection of painting and sculptures, evoking both the seen and the hidden of nature.

It is too simple to call her paintings "paintings" -- they are more like sculptural plaques colored by coffee and marble dust, shaped and textured by layers of gypsum stone. They often depict birds or deer, sharing the frame with grids of mesh in gentle, forest-y tones. It is as if the living and the geometric each echo the shadow of the other, an ecru play of liquid and stone, soft-hard textures, shades of rust and gray and black. Dust (Copper's Hawk) is a white-gray shadow of a perched bird - roosting at dusk in coffee and cream, or waiting behind a fog - leading the viewer to reconsider if there is much distinction between the substances humans and nature brew.

Rosen's sculptures are more evocative, less precise rendition of similar subject matter - and she pays as much attention to the material as to the shapes she forms with it. The Gamut series - vaguely animal sculptures in Provencal limestone - is composed rough, raw stone figures on pedestals. Sphinx is the sharply angled idea of a sphinx; Mayo (named for Rosen's dog) is barely chiseled as if the shape of a dog was found in the stone, then sketched in pencil on the surfaces and in the grooves. In Klimt, one can see some of Klimt's reaching lines and lateral segmentations, but the piece is just as evocative of a burned-out tree trunk. Rodin, on the other hand, is the opposite of Rodin's smooth, precise figures. It is a rough, highly textured, largely undefined shape - perhaps the Rodin-esque figure is buried underneath?

Rosen also has a sense of humor, evidenced for example in Oh Deer and Wall Foot. The former is a wall-mounted sculpture, a nearly five-foot high narrow bird's body with a deer head sculpted around a bundle of sticks, producing an organic, witty quality. Wall Foot emerges bony and elongated from the base of a wall, as if it were impishly waiting to trip an innocent passer-by. Rosen captures the private lives of creatures in her works - both the comic and dramatic sides. And because Rosen represents this privacy, we don't quite gain entry into it.