Several
artists jumped to mind when I was first asked to curate
a part of 444 '99. But somehow, Anthony James' work
seemed to linger the longest. In this new work, where
a fish hovers in space, James considers formalist sculptural
principles, but only as contemplation of a broader
significance. Encased within the confines of stainless
steel and glass,
there exists a universe. That universe has its own
codes and boundaries. Any attempt to cross those boundaries,
or break its codes, would mean its demise. Yet, projected
further into the space, there exists another universe,
in many ways exactly the same as the first. The movement
of the first universe creates the impetus for the second,
but the second is governed by a wholly distinct set
of codes and boundaries.
The fish that mesmerizes within the sculpture is just as elusive as the one
floating freely in space. Each cannot survive without its
precise surroundings, be it water temperature, food, containment, or refracted
light. Although one is completely contingent upon the other, they are singular
in nature. Aspects desired in one are sometimes only realized in its projection.
Both are dependent on the solidity and translucence of glass.
I've always liked artists who, even at a young age, are continuously
reinventing themselves in a fresh way. For me, James does just that.
His new work queries
the relationship of mind, body and presence, using new technologies. His
work follows, stalks and subtly assaults the viewer. They are illusions
of reality,
presenting a dual existence. It is at once simplistic and complex, tangible
and illusory, calming while discomforting.
Spencer Brownstone ©June 1999
A sea of cast-offs,
A landscape of discarded fragments;
Outcasts all, yet united in abandonment.
Clustered together, spreading en masse across the floor;
Form as a consequence of dys-function;
Severed, cylindrical elements—parts retaining an essence and memory of
their whole...
I am struck by the poignancy and humanity of Jean Shin's pants scraps
in Alterations. They are vulnerability, loneliness and longing incarnate. They
are emblems of excess, abnormality, otherness. Each individual component is
a reject—an unessential fabric remnant left lying on some tailor's
floor—until rescued and reconstituted into a new identity. The individual,
the subgroup, and the collective—cylindrical forms of various heights
standing stiff, upright, and assembled in groups by similar color. Like a band
of bedraggled refugees, they have come together and, in solidarity, form a
new and vital entity.
Stiffening, cutting, braiding, sewing, layering, compiling, Jean's handling
of materials lends to her work an air of surreality. Using hair as imaginatively
as she does fabric, she has created a series of drawings using strands of hair
arranged and layered with mylar in suggestive configurations. Framed and hanging
on the wall, they are pure gesture at the same time traces—testimony—of
the living whole to which they once belonged. By means of discarded materials,
Jean manages to reference the human and access the beauty, desire and memory
we, as a collective humanity, all nurture within ourselves.
Susan Harris ©June 1999
Sometimes an
image has a way of lingering in the mind. It remains while
shifting position, opening a series of associations, memories
and constructs which turn over into thoughts in the loveliest
way. Such is the profound encounter I have had with the
work of Sergio Muñoz-Sarmiento. Muñoz is among a younger
generation of artists who take conceptualism’s idea
of art as a philosophical proposition and thicken it with
a mixture of subjective and material elements, broadening
the possibilities of interpretation. Using photography,
language, drawing and sculpture Muñoz investigates the
poetic potential in Wittgenstein’s quarry. He deconstructs
the everyday experience of language to reintroduce the
uncanny and the magical. His work allows us to see the
excess that remains after communication in the constant
passing between material and idea.
Carol Greene ©June1999
In a brilliant
first novel, The Intuitionist, author Colson Whitehead
sets up a dichotomy among elevator inspectors in a dystopian
metropolis. The Empiricists inspect the elevators the old-fashioned
way: nuts-and-bolts fact-finding. The Intuitionists "feel"
their way through the process. There is something coolly
autocratic
and benignly new-age about the work of Erwin Redl which
makes the viewer question the space in between empirical
knowledge and elegiac intuition. Redl's use of Art-101
basics (light and color most obviously) distances him from
others in the burgeoning new-media field. Slipping into
the cracks between high and low tech, Redl’s LED spatial
interventions (as well as other works which don’t
fit into that not necessarily neat box) may evoke Tatsuo
Miyajama to those who theoretically find themselves bound
and tied by a medium-based approach to work. Other precedents
that came up for me during a marathon studio visit were
Fred Sandbeck, Cecilia Vicuda and, of course, Donald Judd.
Redl's work is as much about technology and the way
the search for a cyberutopia is its own metaphor. By going
so decidedly low-tech, Redl's work elevates.
Christian Haye ©June1999 |
