Kathryn Spence can be hard to "get." Some of the local artist's work at "Cloudless White" is obvious, like her simultaneously cute and frightening animals made of scrap fabric. The coyotes, for example, mimic real animals in the want to touch/don't want to touch way. But some of her other sculpture is highly abstract, and we've seen people get confused while looking at it. The search for meaning is not always the best approach with serious art, though. Her styrofoam blocks pocked with wooly lumps, home to delicate collections of iron-on patches or tiny pencil nubs, her sober pine boxes filled with stacked bits of paper and mini-sketches -- we love them for just being themselves. It's when she combines the two approaches that she's at her best; as in Untitled (Hairy Woodpecker and Object), a set of two items, one representing a bird and one merely resembling a bird
June 26-Aug. 22, 2009
