New Haven Independent

You can hear some art works screaming to get out. That has been my usual experience in encountering Jonathan Waters’ large scale sculptures cabin’d, cribb’d, confined”in an Artspace gallery or a West Cove industrial loft where a construction of his recently hung like the skeleton of a giant pinball trapped in mid-bounce. Such imprisonment is not necessarily mistaken, since it intensifies the sense of energy held tight in the form (though some smaller wall pieces of his - Out In Out recently at the John Slade Ely house was exemplary - seem even more potentially explosive, clinging limpet-like to the corner of a room). But there is a difference to Waters in the open air. This is clear from the piece now in place on the Albertus Magnus campus until April 16, its installation curated by a graduating senior, Kristle Scanlon. All outdoor sculpture is site specific to the degree that location becomes a part of its definition, even if it could, like the Waters piece, be moved to another place. Here there is still the large cage of the minimalist cloister which surrounds the courtyard with the work at its center, where it sits like a sundial which experimented at becoming mechanical, and failed gloriously.

More permanently nearby is a rotund and rollicking bronze figure by Barry Svigals of the college’s patron- - Albert the Great - on the verge of a hasty waddle out from under the porch that he is wearing (leaving it miraculously intact, of course, if he did). One wishes only for a buxom saint taking her constitutional in the opposite direction, a holy caryatid to circle with Big Al, like one of those clock tower carousels accompanied by chimes and tourists.

Previous installments:

Object Lesson #4
Object Lesson #3
Object Lesson#2
Object Lesson #1