Ruth Boerefijn: Responding/Internal Landscapes/three Pieces
Jacquelin Pilar
Curator, Fresno Art Museum
Choosing the Museum's Concourse and Administrative Lobby Galleries as her installation site, Ruth Boerefijn's experience as Artist-in-residence in eastern Iceland this past year has been translated by the artist into an ephemeral installation defined by a response to Icelandic weather. The large oak tree on the other side of long windows that look outward to the Museum's Hallowell Sculpture Garden extends the space and the poetic intensity of the work entitled "Ceiling Piece - here and there." Portending how a spring breeze will catch floating blossoms in their downward fall; the delicacy of the work becomes a bracketed experience of weather. Evoking the transitory nature of life in its infinite mystery, the work is imbued with a gentle simplicity.
A college of 43 small paintings plus 1, was created in response to looking from her window upon Iceland's Fljotsdalur Valley. Ruth's window offered the sense of infinite vastness and was constantly changed by light and passing time. She has expressed this mystical experience of looking outward over the landscape as "feeling like a dot to be swept away." The undulating weather patterns seemed to filter into each small painting with an unpredictable flow of energy.
"Wall Piece" covers the high wall at the very end of the Administrative Lobby. It is composed of wispy tendrils placed in such a way as to create negative spaces reaching upward to a landscape uninterrupted by foreground. Ruth Boerefijn's work is that of quietude and infinite longing - it has used a language of impressionism to define landscape charged by the constancy and intricacy of weather's constantly changing currents. Interconnecting light, movement, texture, mood and color are the magical elements chosen to effect Boerefijn's installation.