Holly Lane, "Not Enough Time to Love the World", at the New Museum, Los Gatos

As carved, gilded and decorated frames fell out of fashion in the mid-20th century, an idea took hold. Modern paintings just needed a simple strip of molding around the edge or perhaps nothing at all. Handcrafted frames, besides being expensive, screamed antique. When artist Holly Lane was an undergraduate painting student at San Jose University in the 1980s, she found herself thinking about the demotion of frames and framing. The frame was a demarcation that indicated that all that was within was art. The frame itself and all that was outside the frame was not art. A good frame was to be inconspicuous. She also thought about the way that medieval reliquaries, another form of containment, had protected and presented sacred objects. Sensing an opportunity, Lane began crafting elaborate frames that expanded and supported the meanings of the paintings they enshrined. Four decades later, the result is a body of work that relies equally on Lane's skills as a painter and a woodworker. In her art, in which the reliquary style frames are anything but inconspicuous, everything works together to create meaning. At the entrance of Lane's show in Los Gatos is the piece that gives the exhibition its name, Not Enough Time to Love the World. It presents an image of bubbles, a symbol of ephemerality. Directly above, carved into the frame, is a winged hourglass that evokes the passage of time, hovering beneath an arch symbolizing the span of our lives. In concert, these images tell us that the contemplation of nature is now increasingly charged by a keen awareness of the threats it faces. The artist created After the Storm, one of the more personal pieces in the show, when a forced move brought her to a new location outside the city. Its intricate crown signals triumph after trouble, and the scenes revealed in its side portals, including a starry sky and two dogs fighting over underwear, add wonderment and gentle humor. Another work, Gentle Muse, honors trees and their function as fuel, shade, construction materials, and pharmaceuticals. The gothic style carvings on the frame itself recall the architecture of churches and are complemented by cylindrical apothecary jars. The central image of the tree, executed with graphite on mylar, has an elegiac quality that works in concert with the reliquary character of the frame. Through her exploration of framing, Lane has invented new ways to present a secular sacred with nature at its center. Her art, with its intertwined symbols and images, invites a deeper contemplation of nature's place and meaning in a time of environmental crisis.