Exquisite imperfections Sculpture from Jill Slosburg-Ackerman and Steve Hollinger BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"Jill Slosburg-Ackerman: Sculpture and Sculpted Drawings" At Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art, 14 Newbury Street in Boston, through January 9. "Steve Hollinger: Borrowed Time" At Chase Gallery,129 Newbury Street in Boston, through December 31.

If you’re a lawyer or a nurse or a social worker or a professor of romance languages, you probably haven’t heard of Jill Slosburg-Ackerman. If you’re an artist, you probably have. And not just because she’s a veteran of the Boston arts scene and a mainstay in the 3-D department at Massachusetts College of Art. Jill Slosburg-Ackerman is an artist’s artist — which does not mean her appeal is rarefied or her sculpture requires you to be a connoisseurship to appreciate it. Think of a doctor’s doctor or a favorite restaurant of gourmet chefs — those are the physicians you want when you’re in trouble, the eateries when you’re after a memorable meal. Slosburg-Ackerman, whose work is both visceral and transcendent, gutsy and refined, orderly and outrageous, makes people who devote their lives to making art stop dead in their tracks. The rest of us get to tag along.

Slosburg-Ackerman’s approach to sculpture is as unusual as it is synthetic. She combines pedestrian, manufactured objects — a flimsy metal typing table, a ready-made Akia shelf, a chrome-and-Formica cutting-board bench circa 1960 — with pieces of wood that she has obsessively carved and gouged, chiseled, and smoothed until the two belong to each other: harmony from discord, relationships from dissimilarities, integration from antitheses. The result is sculpture that continually surprises, a never-ending series of unexpected connections between colors and contours, textures and values.

What does it mean that a flea-market-worthy typing table has been joined to what looks like a rough tree stump shaped like an elephant’s leg in Amanuensis? What does it mean that a store-bought shelf unit appears exactly as it did the day of its purchase — except for the gnarled, overly painted tree root that sprouts from its underside in Restless Shelf #16? What does it mean that an antler-shaped piece of wood as ornately altered as a scholar’s rock extends like a solitary wing from a manufactured base of plastic and plexiglass in Yellow Lesson?

For one thing, it means that the divisions most of us fall into thoughtlessly and hourly between indoors and outdoors, real and unreal, phony and true, utilitarian and fanciful, have been brought together in each of these creations. I don’t know what it’s like to have a Slosburg-Ackerman sculpture in my house, but I can imagine there would be a constant tension about putting it to use. Each one of her three-dimensional works invites you, dares you, to find a working place for it (a secret corner, since you’ll want it all to yourself). In other words, her work confronts another division most of us are happy to accommodate without a second thought, the one between art as the stuff of contemplation and stillness and reverence and art as the material and promise of our conscious, day-to-day lives. Is it a table or a symbol, a cutting board or a statement, a shelf or an æsthetic reverie?

The extra (and extra-thick) leg that Amanuensis sprouts — imagine a tornado wedging a gray metal typing table into a tree stump that just happened to be the same height — isn’t the only wooden part of the sculpture. On the top of Amanuensis lies an intricately grooved, elliptical wooden dumbbell. It looks like Siamese bowling pins joined at the neck or a rolling pin with portly handles. However you think of it, the dumbbell lies unattached to its base; you could place it anywhere, but as it rests, one bulbous end lies on the metal of the typing table while the other rests on the brief lip of wood that swells beneath the table to form its fourth, elephantine leg. As it happens, that mysterious ancillary leg was formed from the shavings that fell away in the process of carving the dumbbell.

So there you have it: a pedestrian piece of manufactured metal that’s been joined to a very differently manufactured mound of wood residue. Both are capped by a portable, abstract sculpture that still sports attributes of an assembly-line product. (Much as it’s unidentifiable, it still looks like an old-fashioned tool.) Further, the surface of the metal table has started to rust, and the brittle, brown flakes of its oxidation resemble in contour and hue the surface of the supplementary leg.

The end result is a work of exquisite imperfection in which the painstakingly wrought wears the mask of decay, where decay itself is elevated to the dignity of sculpture, where originality gets mixed up with prefabricated, where no part looks seamless or smooth or inviting to the touch. Yet Amanuensis comes across as balanced and playful, earthy and contrived. Each of its three aspects, metal, wood shaving, and wood, becomes an amanuensis, a helper, in appreciating the other two.

In fact, exquisite imperfection marks all of Slosburg-Ackerman’s sculpture — its appeal and its edginess, its lofty vulgarity. (Her mixed-media drawings — they look like Rorschach tests giving birth to colorful clouds that are about to turn into genies — tend more toward the exquisite.) One of the series represented in the exhibit, Restless Shelves, involves actual shelving — single units or multiple grids, store-bought or crafted by the artist — that leeches into or otherwise gives rise to strange, aberrant, attached fungal shapes. Think Alien-meets-Hold-Everything. In Restless Shelf #16, navy-blue plastic and light-beech-wood veneer form an unprepossessing shelving unit — except for the intricately tangled form bulging beneath the underside of its lowest level. Part truffle, part intestinal spill, the shape proves almost sickeningly biological, alternately suggesting driftwood and a tumor. Noteworthy is the color it’s painted — a pale, derivative blue, as if the industrial navy-blue plastic above had weakened and mutated into some spherical stalactite. The effect is alternately humorous and disturbing, nauseating and riveting. For one thing, the Tasmanian devil of a form makes the rectilinear shelving above seem silly and frail. For all the latter’s formality and precision, the energy lies in the renegade wart. At the same time, the shelf’s formality and precision offer a retreat from the slippery, unpredictable, complex growth that delights in its ambiguity. Squares above meet chaos below, and in both zones, natural and unnatural merge: plastic over particle board above, paint over tree root below. And joined as they are — the unit can still function as a complete shelf — the contradictions become the stuff of our own self-examination. Slosburg-Ackerman makes us address the compatibility and the proximity of what we ordinarily insist on keeping apart, order and disorder, need and waste, purposefulness and dreams.