By Betsy DiJulio

Former native son Will Corr has done it again: despite his enduring formal and conceptual concerns, he has advanced his work to the next level using the visual vocabulary for which he has become so well known.  The familiar iconography is all here—deceptively simple rowboats, popcorn clouds, lollipop trees, birds and diamond patterned ocean swells—as are the “edges,” that is, the geometric structure of overlapping and gently colliding planes of space.  But all of it is freshly conceived.  He has even shifted his signature color palette of neutralized aquas, terracottas, buttery yellows and warm and cool khakis plus black and white accents to correspond to his new directions. 

One such direction in this show is a series the artist calls “Hunter’s Point,” which is ironically a symbolic documentary of “the last remaining working fishing village on the West Coast of Florida” now known as Cortez Village, near Corr’s current home.  Ravaged and otherwise altered by Mother Nature, developmental booms, population migrations, and governmental policy, the community’s economic vitality has ebbed and flowed like the tides of the Sarasota Bay, rendering notions of true progress somewhat ambiguous. 

The five large paintings in the series are intended to be viewed sequentially beginning with a coastal landscape unmarred by human presence.  The next piece depicts the arrival of unmanned row boats followed by the coexistence of boats and houses.  The next image depicts the aftermath of a 1921 hurricane in which Burton’s Store was only one of two structures left standing.  The last piece, “And the Beat Goes On,” sounds a hopeful note about the continuity of generations, but it is the least successful in the group.  Never have I felt that Corr’s work, while optimistic, was the least bit “corny.”   In this case, though, a cluster of five-pointed stars at the end of a long pier flanked by a house and a tethered boat, is reminiscent of Tinkerbell’s wand, a kind of gold at the end of the rainbow.  It functions as too facile of a symbol for this sophisticated artist.

On the opposite side of the gallery, four large and one small painting make use of collage and shallow relief assemblage to break up space in ways both subtle and pronounced, playing edges off of edges, as the show’s title figuratively suggests.   Corr’s physical divisions between land, sea and sky are painted and constructed meditations on actual and metaphorical boundaries and the bridging of same.  I was particularly captivated by one in which a wire ladder, it’s legs balanced in two boats, stretches toward the sky.

Deceptively simple shapes, beautifully layered painted passages, and boldly expressive contour drawings combine to create a world with its own internal logic that probes the edges between nature and culture, somewhat more illustratively in the “Hunter’s Point” series—yet not without Corr’s characteristic poetry—and considerably more metaphorically in the other pieces in the show.

In all cases, the work has an easy livability about it, for it resides quite comfortably on the cusp between the conceptual and the decorative with the latter in no way diluting the former, for the work is as intellectually and emotionally engaging as it is visually appealing.

At the Edge of Dawn

Through March 31

Neil Britton Art Gallery

Virginia Wesleyan College

1584 Wesleyan Drive, Norfolk

757.455.3257

www.vwc.edu