Walk into the back room of Tip Toland’s exhibition at the Bellevue
Arts Museum and there’s a naked old woman lying on her side on the
floor, her back to the entrance.

It’s impossible to stand over her. One is compelled to drop to a
squat. And then it is impossible not to move closer, toward her
face.

This woman is not alive. She is a work of art. She is called Milk
for the Butter Thief and made of stoneware, paint, and pastel;
her hair is sheep’s wool. It is tempting to say, rather than
“not alive,” that this woman is not real, but she is. She has
unbelievable presence. Docents at the gallery say that
visitors—especially women—stand over her and cry.

Nothing is beautified, but everything about her is beautiful. The
way her nipple is submerged in her own sagging flesh, the
gently prayerful position of the hands, the twin hollows in the cheek
and the hip, labia barely appearing between her legs on her back side.
She is as alive as deathly. She could be the only object on display at
Bellevue Arts Museum right now. She could carry an entire museum on her
sleeping weight.

The whole exhibition, called Melt, the Figure in Clay,
contains six figures made in 2007 and 2008 by the artist, who herself
is a slender older woman (age 58; sometimes she uses her own
body as a model, but not in this show). She teaches at Gage Academy of
Art and shows at Pacini Lubel Gallery (she was also a Stranger Genius
Award shortlister in 2007). When she’s on, the art is ferocious.
Nothing else I’ve seen quite touches Milk for the Butter Thief,
but she regularly produces brave work, skilled and utterly unacademic.
(Hyperrealist sculptors like Ron Mueck and Duane Hanson seem gimmicky
and theoretical by comparison.)

Toland’s subjects are the very old and the very young, and Toland
can be sentimental. A young boy with his hands down his pants and an
old man playing a child’s violin at BAM are so sweet that they
veer into kitsch. Far more interesting are a strange
young girl with ancient-looking eyes wearing ugly red wax lips and an
ecstatic yet robotic naked woman on a moving swing (her dentures are
real, listed on the wall label).

Toland’s sculptures are a reassurance to those who are made
uncomfortable by skill in art. Skill can be obnoxious; it can be
shallow. But great skill is invisible. And at that point, where Toland
is working with Milk for the Butter Thief, all the world falls
away from the art as you look at it. There is nothing else. recommended

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...

5 replies on “In Art News”

  2. I loved the show and your review helped me round out what I have absorbed from it. The comparison to Ron Mueck and Duane Hanson is inevitable, but I disagree that Tip Toland’s work makes the others look gimmicky or theoretical. Through the mastery of their chosen media they all rise above the gimmicky and theoretical evoking real emotional response through their sculpture.

  3. This is another amazing show at my favorite art museum (I do more gallery hopping than a SoHo flea). I’ve seen this show twice and each time the humanity and strange beauty of her work never fails to impress me. If you’re a culture vulture, then fly don’t run to see her work.

  4. Interestingly relevant as usual dear Jen, and as astute as austere.

    Given the simple statements that historians and critics throughout the ages have foisted upon the readers and the masses, it is little wonder that the quick eye and steady pen of opinions garnished against an authors service and or impugned research leaves a constant striving for perfection of brush work.

    In ‘ The Appeal ‘,

    (large print editon :
    Random House copyrite 2008 by
    Belfry Holdings, Inc. )

    Author JOHN GRISHAM, gives every new student of compelling defense to the “flurry of disclaimers” that life and death can throw at the unwary.

    As for me and my kind?

    I think I’ll start by looking at the fleece in the color plates provided in

    ‘ THE MAN WHO BECAME CARAVAGGIO ‘
    PETER ROBB

    Henry Holt and Company,LLC
    Copyrite 1998,1999 By Peter Robb :

    if for no other reason than the enjoyment of of the view.

    :< )

    dbk.

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