Visual Arts

A new discovery has allowed sculptor Margo Sawyer to move outdoors.

International paint, an industrial paint used for heavy-duty outdoor applications, is sturdy stuff and every bit as bright as the powder coat Ms. Sawyer usually applies to aluminum and steel boxes to make her brightly colored geometric sculptures. Strong against weather or vandalism, international paint has enabled Ms. Sawyer to place her work outside.

Holly Johnson Gallery

Margo Sawyer's 'Synchronicity of Color' show includes #9 (Yellow Cube) and #7 (Red Violet) at Holly Johnson Gallery.

And she's spent a lot of time outside recently in a Houston park, where earlier this year she installed a public art project, a sculpture that looked like a trailer made of Legos. Working in a pop-colored vein she's tapped for years, Ms. Sawyer added a hefty yet gleeful architectural component to a commission for the Discovery Green with the landscape architecture firm Hargreaves Associates.

Her solo exhibition at Dallas' Holly Johnson Gallery shares the name of the Houston project, "Synchronicity of Color." In a sense, the Dallas show could be considered a collection of B-sides connected to that Houston hit single. A viewer might expect a rigorous statement to emerge from the combined shows, a sweeping thesis revising or refining Ms. Sawyer's thinking on architecture, form and color.

Indeed, the gallery show draws a sharp contrast to the public project. And it's the gallery show that comes up lacking.

The exhibition connects the thread between the brick-formed wall installations Ms. Sawyer has made for years and the more recent move into three-dimensional space, in this case, a stand-alone, floor-based cube.

These wall works are a throwback to sculptures she's made for years. In one piece, jarring color juxtapositions of pink and lavender give way to an overall violet hue. The great value in looking at Ms. Sawyer's work is seeing how she accomplishes this: In her new work, she's no less adept at combining colors, playing a purple off an adjacent pink, while still minding the effect on the entire grid. A few bricks that look as though they've been brushed raw, a signature effect she accomplishes by applying yellow zinc to steel, break up the composition, but that trick is old hat by this point in Ms. Sawyer's career.

Ms. Sawyer's building-block construction has always evoked architecture, and the point is made more literally in her floor piece, a distended Rubik's Cube dominated by warm, ocher hues and arranged to suggest Jenga-esque push-and-pull movement.

But the response to architecture is either missing or muddled. The piece is too much of a space itself to work within the gallery space – there's no harmony or dialogue between the two. The loose cube shape vaguely resembles severe cubic sculptures by minimalist artists, but Ms. Sawyer has always been more interested in the motion of Mondrian.

Her cube points toward art that is primarily concerned with spatial relationships, for example, Rachel Whiteread's plaster casts of buildings, which look like the ghosts of architecture past when they're presented in museums.

Ms. Sawyer's floor piece has this look but not this thrust. The wall applications wind up working much better; because they don't compete with the space, and they have an internal logic that's made clear by composition. They also show off her sense of color better. Still, they risk repeating accomplishments she's already made.

The outdoor innovation is a welcome one. But just as indoor paint wears thin outside, sculptures that tackle nature don't translate to the white cube of the gallery.

Kriston Capps is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.

Plan your life

"Synchronicity of Color," by Margo Sawyer, continues through Saturday at Holly Johnson Gallery, 1411 Dragon St. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Free. 214-369-019, www.hollyjohnsongallery.com.