By Jan Sjostrom
Each Jane Manus sculpture is many works in one. Her geometric painted aluminum sculptures sketch shapes in the air that change depending on the vantage point.
Six large-scale works by Manus are on view for the season at the Armory Art Center’s sculpture garden in West Palm Beach. A smaller wall piece hangs in the gallery inside.
The shapes are familiar — rectangles, boxes, triangles and the like — but they’ve been de-constructed and violated. In the sculpture Danielle, a triangle twists like a dislocated joint. In Screams Big, an angled linear shaft pierces a door-like frame and heads for the sky.
As William Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, said in the introduction to the artist’s recently released DeBuck Gallery monograph, her sculptures are constructed to “conjure up a complex and prismatically shifting array of implicit, transparent spaces and paradoxically insubstantial solid forms.”
