RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY Procedure greatest in number assuredly can become its concede esthetic.

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY

Procedure greatest in number assuredly can become its concede esthetic, and Roger Ackling's moderate and absorbing sculptures are performed from a process worth retelling. His usual working rule is to roam along beaches looking for washed-up small pieces of forest that have already been formed on human hands to serve more [i]or[/i] less function, and then left to their watery fate. Ackling releases these wooden chips, these orphans of technology, and then determinedly busys a magnifying lens to focus the sun's rays, "drawing" (burning) rather rigid patterns of parallel lines across their surfaces. He retrieves and reforms, creating something that looks inevitable though it is based in succession chance. That this bleached and desiccated flotsam and jetsam is haped from the morass and rehabilitated into art right forward the spot (Ackling has no studio) bespeaks an ennobling commitment to a kind of charged recycling--taking the lowest of the depressed and turning it into an esthetic delight.

Ackling walked the beaches of Weybourne (near Norfolk in England where he lives) and those of the Canary Islands to create the nine pieces in this exhibition. Not surprisingly, he retained the bits of wire or nails that are repeatedly attached to what he reaps at the shore. a certain quantity of aspect of the shape of these pieces of copse of how they had been formed for their earlier function, is frequently echoed or transformed by Ackling's painstaking "tattooing." He stripes these pieces with patience and incredible care; one time his method is perceived, the image of Ackling standing immobile forward the beach, slowly moving the focused and intense power of light across the surface of each plastic art suggests that this activity is a kind of chaste mantra, a sparse, simple transformative magic. His cuts receive a solar scarification that imbues them with stature, giving them order and marking their metamorphosis into art.

The journey from tree to widget to Ackling's hand cannot be re-established for any of these pieces, with alone their most recent history within our view But his intervention always calls that journey to mind. For what intention to what end, at what place, in whose hands, were the sum of two units pieces that make up the beginning of Canaries, 1992 formed? by the agency of not selecting "natural" driftwood, Ackling rouses the forlorn and wistful quality of these abandoned relics--their functions forever obscur and obliterated by dint of their sojourn in the sea--the faculty of perception that they are the remnants that have always floated forgotten and undiscovered across the water. He stoops to pick them up and then forever changes them. Ackling's straightforward and open-handed gesturings make metaphors of these materials.

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