Art Review: The Art Of Von Voss 
at the AAM By Mary McCoy

Entering Vicco Von Voss’s exhibit, on view through July 13 at the Academy Art Museum, the first thing you see is a huge arched portal made of slabs of cherry. It’s a fairy tale door that swings open at a touch. Step through and it’s as if you’re entering a world where everything is teeming with life and energy.

The initial impression is of spectacularly beautiful wood shaped in free-flowing forms. Whether creating furniture or sculpture, Von Voss is a master craftsman with a flair for bringing out the natural beauty of wood with imaginative whimsy. “Dance,” a small table covered with the dazzling patterns of burl wood, leans forward on its three delicate legs as if impatient to go pirouetting across the room. Twin shapes resembling elongated commas embrace one another on the surface of “Yin & Yang Table.” The dark one swells upward, while the light one, again in intricately patterned maple burl, is recessed into the table’s surface.

In both his functional works and his sculptures, small, witty details and hidden treasures are intrinsic to Von Voss’s style. You could easily miss it, but there’s a hand-carved acorn hidden under a wall-mounted shelf called “Finding Water.” It’s made to rotate outward so that keys or loose change can be placed in its hollow cup. Like many of Von Voss’s works, it suggests a story, this time about a buried acorn sprouting a pale root that snakes its way up through the soil (a slit in the curved, dark walnut shelf) as it searches for water.

“Metamorphosis” is a swirl of cherry masquerading as a desk with art deco-ish touches of stainless steel and acrylic. Two stacks of curved drawers form its legs and are hinged to swing outward for use, as are the extensions of the desk’s top at each end. A tour de force in bending wood into precise shapes, it’s one of many works that evidence Von Voss’s remarkable skill and exactitude in craftsmanship.

It’s easy to get lost in marveling at his mastery as he bends wood as thin as a leaf, sculpts it into voluptuous curves, or fashions elegant hinges from bits of walnut. In tables, stools, chairs, and abstract sculptures, he pushes his wood and his own abilities to their limits, exploring just how much this basic building material can do. But there’s more to it than his enviable expertise.

In this digital age, true craftsmanship is rapidly disappearing. Part of Von Voss’s aim is to keep his craft alive by sharing it in lectures and workshops and with his assistants. But another aspect of truly mastering an art is that it can put the artist and potentially, his viewers into a higher space.

By its nature, woodgrain holds the record of an individual tree’s irrepressible patterns of growth, as well as the influence of outside factors including weather, physical injury and disease. Each time Von Voss cuts a log open, he discovers the visual evidence of the tree’s life history. Over the years, he has learned to attune himself to the energetic forces behind its patterns, developing a kind of collaboration with them in which he takes the cues for his gestural forms from their natural flow and rhythms.

The result is that his works are unfailingly animated and full of character. “Madonna,” the only work in the exhibit that is overtly figurative, is a gentle S-curve of cherry accented with an inlaid ebony pinstripe that stands close to human height. Toward its apex, the wood flares out a little to each side suggesting a veil, but the details of a face and limbs are left to the imagination. It’s a simple sweep of energy that evokes the enveloping calm and compassion of motherhood.

Woodgrain is intricate and often complex, but Von Voss simplifies its forms, honing in on the essence of the feeling he is working to express. It might be the primal urge of his acorn to find water and grow or the ebullient joy of just being alive embodied by his burled table, “Dance.”

Again and again throughout the show, the energetic gesture is the true subject of Von Voss’s work. Sometimes he allows himself a bit of mischievous humor as in the arc of cherry that forms “Drop of Time,” a working clock that chimes each half hour. Tall and spare, it leans slightly forward over its slowly swinging pendulum, just as time leans toward the future in its eternal march.

In other pieces, the gesture is more abstract but clear in its intention. “Meditation Stool I” is a simple seat of dark walnut perfectly balanced atop two parallel arcs of maple reaching widely to each side. Elegantly austere, it offers a quiet, stable center from which to explore the boundless reaches of spiritual consciousness.

Eschewing the ubiquitous right angles of contemporary furniture and architecture, Von Voss is searching out a more lively and energizing balance between the urge to grow and evolve and the complexities and rational constraints of our culture. As he demonstrates in “Water’s Edge,” although a tabletop must be horizontal, its shape can follow the flowing grain of the wood it’s made of. And as long as they provide it with stable support, its legs can twist and turn like growing plants with an exuberance that is infectious.

In one work after another, Von Voss has captured the irrepressible nature of growth and change. The wood itself guides his creative decisions as he finds its character in the patterns, colors and shapes of its grain. There is a passion in his work that stirs imagination, but there is also something about his mastery that is calming and gratifying. In becoming so intimate with the wood, he reveals its inherent spirit and its life-affirming truths.

..