30 Oct 2020

Pamela J. Wallace & Stephen Reynolds

Opus 40

Reviewed by Elizabeth Johnson

Because of Covid-19, Harvey Fite's Opus 40 Gallery pivoted into a collaborative sculpture installation on a lawn of Opus 40 itself, a former bluestone quarry overlooking the Catskills that Fite transformed into a sprawling earthwork between 1939 and 1976.

Pamela J. Wallace's and Stephen Reynolds' Speculation on Twelve Sidedness recalls a factory and the base-60 Sumerian numerical system that relates time and degree to an axis using twelve different whole numbers as divisors. Speculation's sheet metal smokestack and concentric steel and wood base funnel fresh air down rather than spewing pollution skywards. Water Capture is a set of three funnel stands that drip rainwater into a steel plant bulb, or onto a cement bladder, or an inert, foot-like vessel. By design, each fails to hold water. Synced with Fite's colossal monument to gravity and nature, the critique of unsustainable profiteering marks human error as stemming from smaller, thus surmountable, engineering choices.