The heroic but sparse gestural feel of modernist painterly abstraction combines with the familiar imagery of pop-image collage in Sharon Bell’s work. Size and imaginary scale clash conspicuously in her works. The collages do not often grow beyond five spare inches (floating in the creamy neutrality of standard-size drawing paper), but the scale of these images is certainly vast. This disjuncture of size and scale, as well as a clash between space and frontality . . . creates visual contradictions. Cultural space is also used and again made precious through the appropriation and arbitrary combination of fragmented imagery which retains sly bits of its original identity as mundane things. Abstraction in Bell’s work is composed of concrete, everyday elements. A city-like grid imposes itself upon the smaller parts — the artifacts of the city — in many of these collages. The power of the small, of the intimate, contrasts yet is infused with the heroic scale of Abstract Expressionism. In looking at Bell’s work we contemplate the strange idea that it can now be heroic to do small work.
—Brian Butler, Visions Art Quarterly

 

Sharon Bell [packs] her collaged pieces with depth, angles and action. They are small environments. Yet as filled with movement as they are, they have a sense of spaciousness. It is artistic wizardry to create such as environment without making it look like it’s a snippet of something else.
—Joan Crowder, Santa Barbara News-Press


“The Sticking Place: Space and Image in Contemporary Collage” gathered together a most diverse group of artists who all happen to share an instinct for collage, no matter what media they use. Sharon Bell, for example, takes color photographs and reconstitutes them into constructivist abstractions, their recognizable parts making architectural wholes. Bell’s works are small, rhythmically geometric, and appropriately framed as if jewels in a treasure vault.
—Judith Hoffberg, Visions Art Quarterly


Sharon Bell’s Untitled #192 and Untitled #194 are small-format collages of intimate interior spaces in which familiar objects transcend their scale and function. Next to a Corinthian column is a gold filigree ring of similar scale, floating with other, less distinguishable objects. By playing with established notions of identification and function, Bell addresses issues such as preciousness and importance — the hierarchy of objects when measured by preconceived values of material, weight, form, and size.
—Dena Hawes, The Santa Barbara Independent


Sharon Bell’s series of small collages confirms her talent for putting big things into small packages. She packs elements of depth, perspective light and shadow into spaces about 4 by 5 inches. She mixes objects that our minds tell us are large — such as Ionic columns — with elements that we think of as small, such as jigsaw puzzle pieces. In her Lilliputian environments they assume the same scale. They are superimposed and juxtaposed to suggest fanciful architectural spaces. They become keyhole glimpses into dream worlds.
—Joan Crowder, Santa Barbara News-Press


She is capable of evoking visual poetry.
Michael W. Darling, The Santa Barbara Independent