Jubilation through repetition

Artists spin joy by drawing on pop culture

BROCKTON -Hot-toned, handcrafted, and spinning with concentric circles, the works of Xenobia Bailey and Micah Sherrill, now up in adjoining galleries at the Fuller Craft Museum, have a few things in common. Both draw on popular culture, and their work reveals techniques that require obsessive repetition. They make a fizzy, joyful pair.

Bailey's got a joyful agenda, too. The artist says in a statement that she uses free-form crochet to create objects of jubilation. Several of her vibrant mandalas, from finger-tip size to maybe 10 feet in diameter, hang on facing yellow walls. Some overlap and tumble together. Jazz music hums smoothly through the show.

The entire installation clearly represents a cosmology, with suns and moons noted in titles of individual works. Imagine a cosmos in which the planets were crocheted like your grandmother's afghan, with rhythmic patterns and colors that draw on African textiles, set in the sacred circle form found in many cultures - it's at once cozy and mind-blowing.

Bailey reuses and recycles a lot of her work, and "Portions of the Re-Possessed" draws on both "(RE)possessed," a larger project she's been working on for the past year, and "Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk - Phase IV," which she showed at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2002. But "Portions of the Re-Possessed" is sparer.

I mention it, because abundance works in Bailey's favor; it's part of her aesthetic. "Paradise" was a much more ambitious show. In addition to her mandala wall hangings there, she installed a lofty tent and crocheted a soft-sculpture woman, sitting cross-legged in front of it. Mannequins decked out in brilliant costumes stood about. Curtis Mayfield was on the soundtrack. Text from a creation myth she had penned herself ran around the gallery walls. Indeed, the artist's funk-infused installation invited the viewer to step right into a myth ripe with passion, suffering, succor, and faith.

"Portions of the Re-Possessed" shares the tone of "Paradise." Bailey's technical mastery and her visionary exuberance are here; she still honors her own visual version of funk, which is the unflagging spirit of African-American music. But it feels smaller and more contained, and jubilation is something that should not be contained.

For all he shares with Bailey, Sherrill has a much smaller focus: the portrait. The artist paints realist portraits on wood from photographs, then adds patterns, halos, and thought bubbles in a fascinating array of materials. What surrounds the portraits is as alluring as the faces themselves; Sherrill riffs on character, suggests subtext, and plays with unlikely associations.

"I use the language of iconography for everything I depict," he says in an artist's statement, "which allows me to see a subject as I think God might." I take his point: although these are smallish works, the figures in them seem larger than life, ridiculously vivid, partly due to Sherrill's careful painting technique, and partly due to the radiating halos many of them sport.

One of the hallway gallery's two walls features images of ordinary people, other artists Sherrill befriended at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. On the other wall hang icons, of one sort or another: Christopher Reeve as Superman, Grace Kelly, George W. Bush.

There's a charming painting, "Cracking Crème Brulée," of the French actress Audrey Tautou, who starred in the 2001 romantic fable "Amélie." She smiles coyly from a narrow horizontal panel; it crops the top of her head. She appears to be holding a spoon in front of her, in which we see a black-and-white image of Judy Garland as Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz."

A ring of gold and red surrounds Tautou; inside and outside of that halo, Sherrill has embedded the flat stubs of colored pencils in resin; sparkles glimmer around them. It's a fey, gorgeous piece, a meditation on innocence, but the most striking thing is the depth of those resin-embedded pencils in contrast to the portrait, which sits on the work's surface. Icons represent something of ourselves that we project onto them - they can be all surface; Sherrill's suggestion of something deeper, yet intangible, is moving.

In "The Subtractor," on the Penland wall, Sherrill has painted a man at work, wearing a welding visor. Sparks don't fly off the machine he works at; rather, rays shoot from his head, made up of scores of tiny nails and screws encased in resin. Circles notched and shining with aluminum leaf and cracked red paint spin around him. In these portraits of artists, Sherrill deftly balances the people themselves with a vision of a greater force that they surrender to, one that combines sweat with imagination, and ends up making art.