ARTFORUM.COM Critics' Picks 2006

Sue de Beer
MARIANNE BOESKY
509 West 24th Street
November 30–January 10

Sue de Beer’s new video installation, The Quickening, 2006, smartly blends elements of slice-and-dice slasher films with hints of the eccentric gleaned from elder artists Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley. As in her previous work, the gallery contains a sculpture created in tandem with the video production—a thirteen-foot-tall illuminated ring of trees, made from plywood, that projects shadows on the surrounding walls—and a specially constructed screening room, this time decked out with red shag carpet, beanbag chairs, and a dropped ceiling. The video portrays a fragmented narrative, laced with the repressed sexuality endemic to mid-eighteenth-century Puritan New England and voice-overs excerpting texts by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Jonathan Edwards. More brainy than bawdy, de Beer conflates high and low culture within a frayed psychedelic aesthetic. Shaky camera movements, superimposed images, and cheesy audio effects reinforce a heightened sense of artificiality, and everything—including the campy constructions of femininity—appears disconnected and spurious. Her point, it seems, is to expose the frail underpinnings of most horror films (as well as Puritan witch hunts) and the uneasy visual pleasure—the flip side of fear and disgust—we take when we suspend our disbelief. Taking these sentiments into account, which is easier said than done, de Beer’s exhibition charts a new, well-considered path for her growing oeuvre.

"A Fold in the Fabric"
LMAKPROJECTS
526 West 26th Street #310
November 16–December 16

A focus on materiality threads through the audio and visual installations in this group show, which, at times, are impossible to hear, can be missed in the blink of an eye, or emerge only via interpreter. The last is literally true in Dominique Petitgand’s two-speaker installation Proportions, 2006, wherein a French narrator provides definitions of phenomenological experiences while a translator attempts, largely unsuccessfully, to explain her thoughts in English. As the characters speak, diegetic sounds of clatter and music isolate the words lost in translation to alienating effect. Andy Graydon also explores the agency of language, albeit with a Lacanian twist: In Spec to Spectrum (three solids), 2006, a pair of speakers serve as bookends to an autographed stack of papers whose slight movements index the artist’s voice as it quietly emanates. The permeability of image—rather than sound—is taken up in Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Phototactic Behavior in Sewn Slides, 2004, a stunning slide show of abstract, sewn images. Each slide is projected for ten seconds, just long enough for one to notice the loose ends of thread gently swaying in the breeze generated by the antiquated machine’s whirring fan. Weaving in and out of large holes—akin to film burns—the thread keeps the image blurry, as the projector’s automatic focus fails to render each perfectly. Several performances and screenings that accompany the exhibition further demonstrate materiality on the verge of obsolescence in the face of our slick, increasingly digitalized, and all too easily deciphered culture.

Molly Smith
KS ART
73 Leonard Street
October 18–December 1

For her solo gallery debut, Molly Smith makes unexpected bedfellows of simplicity and ambiguity through a modest collection of paintings and cast-plaster sculptures. Smith’s barely-there forms, rendered in watercolor on paper, are harnessed by the empty space surrounding them, as in Grounded (all works 2006), a pair of tube socks packing bricks, and Lean, a series of thin lines moving crabwise across the sheet. In other works, the space deepens from within, as in Hatch, in which the interior of an open box reveals seemingly endless watercolor shadows. The artist’s recent switch to larger sheets of paper does not diminish the intimacy that characterized her previous works, and the use of singular titles, also new to her practice, helps make explicit the references on the page through sparse means. Small narratives emerge from these poetic works: Tear, a stunning watercolor of a torn sheet of paper set out to sea, curiously relates to Load, a cast-hydrocal sculpture of paper cradling an ink-cum-oil spill. Bust, a sculpture that assumes the look of both a beat-up bare canvas affixed to the wall and a body imprinted on a beach towel, possesses an unusual affinity with the work of Robert Gober and Rachel Whiteread. Smith shows that simple ideas can be quite complex. With a quixotic approach to paper, she takes this platitude and makes it her own—no easy feat.

Fred Tomaselli
JAMES COHAN GALLERY
533 West 26th Street
October 6–November 11

Fred Tomaselli’s recent work engages experience through memory, perception, and imagination while exploring new terrain, including wildlife studies and grotesque portraiture, to positive effect. Employing a barrage of repetitive, exacting patterns—fingernail-size cutouts from magazines and books, candy-colored pills, and foliage—the artist creates an ultrasensorial atmosphere, one that generates the kind of “aha” moments typically inspired by meticulously layered aural harmonies. Migrant Fruit Thugs, 2006, one of several large works invoking John James Audubon, depicts two birds, composed of manifold beaks, eyes, and flowers, that possess impossibly long tails and preen against fig leaves and tiny star-shaped fireworks glittering in a night sky. Hang Over, 2005, recently featured in Paul Schimmel’s “Ecstasy” show at MoCA Los Angeles, is a two-panel work in which photo-collage garlands laced with acrylic pills droop gracefully from a leafless tree. Though this might seem to be a purely Dionysian romp, it is worth noting Tomaselli’s finely tuned Apollonian sense. By thickly coating his intricate arrangements with high-gloss resin as if to offset their precious ephemerality, the technical virtuosity of these works counterbalances their sense of weightless enthusiasm. This is most evident in the smaller, grotesque portraits, including Glassy, 2006, wherein a monstrous figure of collaged eyes, muscles, ears, and skin grafts receives divine inspiration from descending ornamental lines, like a psychedelic-Gothic saint. This exhibition offers a blitz of transcendental experiences, and if you hear snippets of Pet Sounds while looking, you'll leave this show slanted and enchanted, wondering whether it's all in your head.

"Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video"
INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street
September 14–January 7

The frank sentiment of “A Global Warning,” one of the prescriptive taglines for Al Gore’s recent documentary An Inconvenient Truth, is at the heart of “Ecotopia,” the second ICP triennial of photography and video. Yet the descriptive and thorny ideas in this sizable exhibition—from the “nomadic postconsumers” of the future (Mary Mattingly) to the black-market trade in endangered species (Patrick Brown)—save it from moralistic didacticism and fear-inducing value judgments. With an empathetic approach, the one hundred works sustain a broad discourse on the politics and aesthetics of nature. There are several affinities among the works on display here, but they are not to be found in utopian thinking. Depicting the fragile state of the American environment in their photographs, Mitch Epstein and Clifford Ross invigorate the exhausted genre of landscape painting. Diana Thater and Mark Dion, symbolically toeing the line between obsession and conservation, provide surveillance views of wild animals. A digital slideshow of recent ecological disasters is harnessed inside one room, with images of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath by photojournalist Vincent Laforet and of the Inupiat people (the first victims of global warming) by Gilles Mingasson. Marine Hugonnier and Doug Aitken hint at the paranoid isolation of blank space and futuristic “meta-cities.” But is it really so strange? In this long-winded ride through the knee-shaking sublimity of flora and fauna and the disastrous exploitation of both, the curators seem to question how far empathy really takes us, and how much longer it will be before the future is now.

Sara VanDerBeek
D'AMELIO TERRAS
525 West 22nd Street, Ground Floor
September 8–October 14

Sara VanDerBeek’s first solo exhibition astutely evokes the uncanny in photographs of sculptural assemblages and collages, capturing the creepy aura of the constructed objects within two dimensions. Here, the repressed returns via enigmatic twists and turns: Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, and Hannah Höch spring to mind, and mementos—which seem to have a deeply personal meaning and look recondite when combined with wire, thread, and ribbons—abound. In One of Only Two, 2006, a collaged page from the Illustrated London News is set against a black background, like a trapped specimen. VanDerBeek has blocked much of the page’s contents with pieces of fabric and a postcard of Malevich’s Dynamic Suprematism, leaving uncovered images of fragmented sculptures from the Parthenon. The historical referents in this work, and throughout the show, harbor a troublesome kind of beauty that reveals mystical connections the longer one gazes at them. Ziggurat, 2006, pictures a mobile of spiritually charged images and reflective, amuletlike objects that produces a similarly dreamlike effect. VanDerBeek’s photographs stand out against the recent wave of metaphysical art, however, as the clever pairing of images (from ancient civilization to pop culture) and the darker, at times deathly, themes approach more resonant territory. The frictions between the strange and the familiar, in their formal and conceptual sophistication, move the work beyond mere quotation of historical sources, shedding new light on a spellbinding phenomenon.