Time Piece (Bay of Rainbows), 2000; urethane, motors.

The title of this exhibition, Roundabout, suggests encircling movement or investigation through a multiplicity of means. Cleveland area-based Isabel Farnsworth moves deftly back and forth between a diverse range of media including sculpture, prints, installation, video and performance. She takes the metaphorical and physical body and its parts as a starting point for her whimsical yet thoughtful exploration of sensation, emotion, desire and cycles of reproduction.

Hydroscope (Sea of moisture), 2000; aluminum, water.

For Farnsworth, the physical and psychological body oscillates between vulnerability and resilience. The internal body as receptor is a filter for external world stimuli, and the eyes and ears acute channels for reception and communication. An embodiment of emotion, the tearing eye is also a regenerative mechanism for cleansing. Hydroscope (sea of moisture), 2000 and Hygroscope (sea of vapors), 2000, oversized cast aluminum evocations of the human eye, reference water as both emotive and recuperative. Hygroscope alludes metaphorically to a kind of messy, uncontrolled weeping as its video loop records a bathroom sink overflowing, while the continual flow of the water fountain in Hydroscope amplifies the scale and sensation of the normally silent and unnoticed cleansing and lubrication of the eye. The body's sensuality, an aspect of its vulnerability and resilience, are ironically mined in the artist's performance video that accompanies the sculptures sad boy harp, 1998, and butt drum, 1998. For Farnsworth, sad boy, a misshapen male figure-as-stringed instrument lying in a rather prone position, "depicts a kind of closed, penis-obsessed male system." In an interesting gender reversal, an erotic and satirical atmosphere is established as the artist lovingly attempts to "perform some beauty" with the diminutive sad boy cradled in her lap.

Sadboyharp, 1998; epoxy, guitar strings, tuning machines, miscellaneous.

Farnsworth brings a gendered perspective to biological reproduction and its relationship to a mechanized, external world. As time relative to a finite window of reproduction changes and condenses throughout our lives, the artist poses the question, how do we posit ourselves along this continuum? Hope Chest (sea of fertility), 2000, is a womb-like torso filled with a dozen ticking alarm clocks. Time Piece (bay of rainbows), 2000, features twelve multicolored flower forms with smiling baby faces at their center that turn as their "petals" interlock like gears. Tongue-in-cheek, Farnsworth links cultural and biological determinism in regard to reproduction and the female body with the insistent mechanical motion and measurement of time born of the Industrial Revolution. Time Piece pokes fun at symbiotic relationships between human replication and the cookie-cutter multiplicity of industrial production.

Ear Guitar, porcelain, plastic, steel, guitar strings, tuning machines.

Farnsworth is interested in how the conceptual levels of sculpture unfold, "how surprise develops," through our relationship to the physical properties of a piece. She works through a primary level of playfulness-a lead-in to the more serious issues underlying her work. Farnsworth exploits a sort of "Rube Goldberg goofiness" and a corresponding attachment to materials that are cheap, stylized and bright in hue (such as the color and shape of a "dog chew-toy"). The seductiveness of her silly or absurd objects and use of non-precious materials are, in part, a byproduct of the artist's interest in cheap, mass manufacture and the visual riot of toy super stores. Always voracious about learning the next thing, Farnsworth is fascinated with how things work, but she does not consider herself especially knowledgeable about machinery. "If I were an expert machinist, I probably wouldn't make my work in the way that I do." There is a charm about the trajectory of Isabel Farnsworth's oddly shaped, oddly kinetic forms that deepens her conceptual inquiry. Essential to this work is an uninhibited, even eccentric sensibility about materials and their prospects for movement. Rooted in an almost childish but sophisticated appeal to our senses, the physical characteristics of this work mediate through surprise and delight the artist's multi-layered engagement with notions of the body and time.

Dan Younger
Director
Olin Art Gallery

This essay is based upon an interview with Isabel Farnsworth conducted in August 2001. Quotations are derived from statements by the artist.