It is far too easy for people who follow contemporary visual art to dismiss sculptor Deborah Butterfield as “the horse lady.” While it is true that her bronze-cast driftwood and scrap-metal constructions are immediately recognizable -- even to those with only the most fleeting experience of her work -- no visit with them can fail to stir the viewer.

With their seemingly elemental and sketch-like construction, her horses have the vibrant energy of the pre-historic cave paintings of Altamira or Lascaux. What remains disarming about them, however, is their weight and scale.

Butterfield re-animates heavy, discarded material itself once subject to powerful, dramatic phenomena. The life force within her horses becomes a metaphor for the transformation of all earthly matter, and vice-versa. In the worn wood fragments, we experience the germination, growth, and destruction of massive trees. In the bent and torn metal, we feel the extraction, forging, and oxidation of industrial steel.

Looking at any specific point on these sculptures, we always recognize their essential “horseness” and see it as well within the commonplace materials from which they have been constructed. Contemplating Butterfield’s composition process – her ability to identify a horse’s rear end in a gnarled stump or a graceful neckline in a broken dumpster lid – contributes to our sense of fascination.

The larger works constructed from bronze-castings of wood are in the main gallery; the heavy metal beasts are in the back. Her most riveting equines, however, are the compressed, reclining ones, which appear ready to rise up at any moment.