ARTFORUM INTERNATIONAL Exhibition Reviews

2007: Sadie Benning, Dana Frankfort.

December 2008:

Chris Johanson
Deitch Projects

Comprising paintings and one large installation, Chris Johanson’s second solo exhibition at this gallery was equal parts cryptic and clear-cut, lighthearted and sarcastic, comic and tragic. Most of the artist’s new works employ a Crayola palette and are composed of wood he gathered from Brooklyn Dumpsters and discarded art-shipping crates. While recycling and revitalization were evidenced throughout the show, Johanson did not apply such strategies to his own output. Indeed, the elements that one might most readily associate with the artist’s earlier work (cartoon thought bubbles, copious hand-written text, crudely rendered figures languishing in urban and suburban environments) were almost completely missing. In their place, the new series of abstract paintings offers ecological visions of the past, present, and future, Johanson now directly confronting themes he has only flirted with before.

Visitors entered the exhibition on an enclosed gray-painted ramp, a metaphoric birth canal, which led into a large dome featuring nineteen rectangular paintings on interconnected billboardlike supports. In this awkward, labyrinthine art-yurt, the recorded sounds of a drum circle (Johanson’s band, named Is) gave the space a primordial feel; likewise, a few primitive-looking figures lurk in the paintings. Several of them display imagery the artist has employed since the 1990s, such as bodies kneeling and praying, multicolored bricks, and circles resembling abstract heads. The paintings here faced a massive gray rotating mobile resembling a meteorite with a mirror shard stuck to its side. The arrangement imparted a fractured narrative, akin to a comic book whose frames have been rendered in three dimensions and dispersed; it was an all-encompassing, experiential environment, conveying a sense of unity supported by the exhibition’s title, “Totalities.”

Exiting the installation into the gallery’s bright lights, one encountered an angled minimalist plank covered in blue carpet remnants that extended to a wall where a yellow orb, perhaps a representation of the sun, was installed above a painting featuring various splotchy circles, suggesting faces in a church congregation, with built-up surfaces and interconnecting lines. Across from this area, rows of wooden chairs faced three colorful panels, the first depicting another abstract headlike circle, the second a psychedelic swirl of colors, the third a network of paint globules. With a meditative tone imparting a feeling religious and ceremonial, these works hint at something beyond aesthetic contemplation. The two installations seem to emphasize different devotional modes: one active, with forward movement, suggesting a pilgrimage; the other, seated passivity, with obstructed views. Both works stress organization and individuality, crunchy New Age schmaltziness and something much deeper, more sincere and personal.

The upstairs gallery housed paintings on paper reminiscent of Johanson’s earlier work. Standing atop the staircase, one had a clear view of the entire exhibition landscape, wherein all the installations, the “totalities,” as it were, seemed just as, if not more, important than the individual works. Here it was apparent that Johanson has grown increasingly adept at translating, with considerable resonance, his narrative figuration into abstraction, following an experimental and energetic trajectory that has served his work well. The exhibition also showed the artist carefully balancing lofty, enigmatic subjects and cultivating, as he tends to do, a personal garden to thoughtfully develop his practice and preferences. Yet, as idiosyncratic as it looks, Johanson’s work continues to tap unassumingly into a collective unconscious of fears and anxieties, hopes and dreams, allowing the unknowable and intangible to feel as salient as the everyday.

 

November 2008:

"Quiet Politics"
Zwirner & Wirth

The terms “quiet” and “politics” usually have very little to do with one another, yet this group exhibition attempted to reconcile them, to show in a sense that still waters can run deep. While the show proposed that even the simplest gesture could be an act of political resistance, the works by twelve artists here were mostly either restrained or offered only loose ties to activism, with standouts by Rosemarie Trockel (one of just four women in this show, a bothersome disparity) and David Hammons. More regrettably, however, it failed to address, either directly or obliquely, the significance of this election year, and, even granting that subtlety was the very point, seemed curiously lacking in gusto for a show about political art mounted in the thick of one of the highest-stakes presidential races in American history.

Up first, a work by the young artist Michael Brown that features a large stainless-steel mirror with a spider web of cracked lines radiating from the center, as if it had been punched. Titled In the Meantime . . . II, 2007, it creates unsettling distortions of everything it faces, but the effect is more punk than political (bringing to mind the iconic artwork of the Black Flag album Damaged [1981]). Nearby was Hammons’s U.N.I.A. Flag, 1990, a representation of the United States flag in black, red, and green: colors usually associated with Africa or the Black Power movement. Both Hammons and his art have frequently been called elusive, yet here, by using symbols fraught with meaning, he offered a precise subject: American racism. But the majority of works here appeared more remote.

For example, there was Adel Abdessemed’s Cocktail, 2007, which comprises twenty-two open notebooks—each on its own music stand—showing charcoal outlines of figures hurling Molotov cocktails, or sparkling gems. Abdessemed has remarked that his work is not performative; instead he prefers to say it “acts,” and indeed the movements across these pages signify action and activism, however indirectly. Hung adjacent to this installation were three photographs from Christopher Williams’s 1989 series, “Angola to Vietnam*.” For these works Williams chose flowers indigenous to countries in which, according to a 1986 Commission on International Humanitarian Issues report, human rights violations and politically motivated disappearances have occurred. He then photographed glass models of these flowers from the Harvard University Botanical Museum collection; the results are coolly reserved.

The upstairs gallery featured a single work: I Only Wish That I Could Weep, 2001–2002, by Walid Raad’s fictitious collective, the Atlas Group. The video features frenetically paced surveillance footage purportedly shot by a government cameraman in Beirut who turned away from his assignment each night to film the sunset. Two years ago it was installed near Tacita Dean’s short film of a sunset in “Grey Flags” at Sculpture Center in New York. “Grey Flags” shares a few similarities with this exhibition—more art by men than women and most of it conceptual—but its activist sentiment and electric, anarchic undercurrent was at least intriguing. This show was meeker, with a looser theoretical underpinning that favored aesthetics and, in some cases, elegance over political meaning, at times choosing to ignore politics altogether. Ambiguity was most evident in a creepy pair of photographs by Roni Horn, Untitled no. 14, 1998/2007, which portray the turned heads of two taxidermic fowl. While the majority of the works in “Quiet Politics” are memorable on their own, to see them in this uneven group show was a disservice both to their quietness and to politics at present.

 

October 2008:

Danica Phelps
Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL)

Danica Phelps’s fifth solo show at this gallery marked a watershed moment in her career. Although Phelps has blended art and autobiography for the past decade, her new work is more ambiguous, selective, and, at times, abstract. Take her previous two exhibitions here as points of departure: For 2003’s “Integrating Sex into Everyday Life,” the artist recounted her sexual awakening as a lesbian; in 2005’s “Wake,” she detailed her daily routine of waking up in the morning. Both of these shows featured works on paper that—bearing hand-written itemized lists and painted stripes, which represent dollars (red for spent, green for earned, gray for owed)—meticulously document her finances. For this most recent show, “Material Recovery,” Phelps continued to use conceptual schemas, but presented her life not in rigorous detail but as filtered through a hazy sense of time, space, and language. In the work shown in the second gallery, she made the personal references quite oblique, offering a number of panels displaying her signature stripes—the links between her art and life—produced factory-style.

Only one “stripe list” appeared in the show, as if it were the final page of a book. “I made my last list on January 24, 2007. I found it made me too sad to look back on my life at that point and reflect on it in such detail,” Phelps noted in the press release. Out of trash culled from her studio, the artist sculpted or cut all the letters written on that final list, then dispersed them among three new sculptural works. The fragile letters wavered on cardboard strips stuck in glass bottles in a corner of the gallery and hung from the ceiling in a cluster, like a jumble of musical notes. The rest of the letters composed two mawkish sentences on one wall: IT MADE ME TOO SAD TO WRITE DOWN EVERY FIGHT WE HAD and MAYBE IF I DON'T WRITE IT DOWN MAYBE IT WILL CHANGE. These suggest that the primary motivation behind Phelps’s artistic transition was a waning relationship, but with whom or what was unclear.

It’s possible that Phelps’s latest offering presented less a turning point than new approaches to her tried-and-tested subject: herself. Some works in the exhibition document her travels earlier this year to India, where she underwent in vitro fertilization. Covering the walls of the first gallery were delicate, disorienting drawings and prints—overlapping portrayals of hospitals, mogul-minature-like scenes, floral landscapes—without an ounce of text. Collectively titled IVF in India, 2008, these long scroll drawings snaked into the second gallery, in which brown stripes (a mixture of red, green, and gray, her typical stripe colors) were everywhere. A team of assistants worked with Phelps to paint and affix these paper stripes to three wood panels, which served as examples of what visitors could custom order from Phelps for fifteen cents per stripe (the minimum order being fifty thousand stripes). The results are small yet absorbing abstractions that, while intriguing for their formal qualities alone, also shift the artist’s work into more Warholian terrain. But despite Phelps’s wry managerial stance, her new paintings are layered with meaning; they are a compendium of the past decade of her art.

I left the show wanting more, perhaps because the voyeuristic pleasure of examining the daily details of Phelps’s life was now unachievable. However, the register of privacy in this show felt more realistic than in her previous works, which tend to bare all and spare none. A feeling that one might need to see her earlier art to understand this transition also lingered. Even so, the exhibition demonstrates that Phelps is not concerned with the small details anymore; her new work underscores a condition that many of us face when watersheds occur: keeping busy.

 

September 2008:

Tomory Dodge
CRG Gallery

When I think of the Los Angeles-–based artist Tomory Dodge, a specific painting comes to mind: Weekend, 2005. Titled after Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film, the canvas depicts a red drum kit amid a thicket of loose yet perfectly restrained gestural marks suggestive of a chaotic, trash-strewn forest. Weekend was featured in Dodge’s first solo show in New York at CRG in 2006 and encapsulates the narrative themes he developed between 2002 and 2007 in works that portrayed haphazard disasters, debris, and the type of destitute terrain found just off the highway. In the six new paintings that made up his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Dodge explores entirely different types of explosions and catastrophes, moving closer to abstraction and away from the precarious landscapes and wastelands that defined his earlier work.

Like their predecessors, Dodge’s most recent canvases are composed of oddly stacked and structured lines and fat slabs of piled-up pigment. Again, the artist has used a palette knife to smear paint across his works’ surfaces, creating patterns akin to animal fur, and left some blobs to sit like wads of chewing gum. But here, instead of building landscapes through a mosaic of marks, Dodge’s brushstrokes deteriorate into a frenzied mass. Wide rainbow clusters spread against blue, pink, and black backgrounds, like fireworks against toxic skies. In Tung (all works 2008) a geyser of pastel and neon colors swells up behind a thick surface of crisscrossed strokes. Drop shows fluorescent tubes falling among a mélange of multihued marks similar to that pictured in Tung, but here the background has a dark nocturnal cast. The titles provide subtle clues to the nature of these explosions: Daisy Cutter recalls the name of a fifteen-thousand-pound bomb dropped by American forces on Vietnam and Afghanistan, while Depth Charge Ethyl, although named after a song by the band Grinderman, also alludes to anti-submarine explosives developed during World War I.

Lost in these weightless and hallucinogenic scenes is a sense of place, as if they are capturing detonations midair. More entrancing, however, is Dodge’s eagerness to experiment. In his new works, the artist explores how different marks can interact and accumulate, in ways that make them seem about to fall apart; it is like he is playing a solitary game of Jenga. Given the ephemeral nature of his earlier subjects, Dodge’s turn to a greater level of abstraction is perhaps expected, but, as evidenced by the several representational paintings in his show at Alison Jacques Gallery in London last fall, his future work may not necessarily be abstract. He’s simply becoming more and more invested in his central subject—paint.

A nauseating exuberance hovers beyond the gestures in these canvases, which recall the sublime through an abstract and seductive use of color and movement. The compositional negotiation between beauty and destruction suggests the artist’s preoccupation with catastrophe, rapture, transcendence, and rebirth. The paintings bring to mind Dana Schutz’s recent imaginings of the future and Barnaby Furnas’s pictures of floods and violence. Yet the apocalyptic undertow is harder to find in Dodge’s new paintings than in the work of his peers. His paintings may allude to escalating disaster, but the effect is ironically achieved through the pictures’ colorful, fluffy charm. Looking at them feels like enjoying the calm before the storm.

 

Summer 2008:

Muzi Quawson
Yossi Milo Gallery

From the recent blockbusters Knocked Up and Juno to the media hounding of Katie Holmes and Suri Cruise, America seems to be in the grip of a strange obsession with young mothers. Muzi Quawson's first solo show in New York invoked this fascination through a voyeuristic look into the life of a twentysomething folk musician and mother, Amanda Jo Williams. In twelve large photographic lightboxes, Quawson documents the daily lives of Williams and her twin toddlers, who reside in Woodstock, New York. But while the photographs are effective depictions of domestic motherhood, Quawson's work is more valuable for its convincing--if romantic--meditation on the recent past.

Quawson, a 2006 graduate of London's Royal College of Art, met Williams in 2002 and arranged several visits to photograph her over the next four years. The artist exhibited the resultant pictures as a slide show of over two hundred images, titled Pull Back the Shade , in the 2006 Tate Triennial of New British Art. By honing the selection here and using lightboxes instead of a projection, Quawson continued to emphasize, through different means, the links between her work and cinema. Up close, with their gritty spots and blurred edges, the prints are reminiscent of old film stills. From a distance, they resemble scenes from American road movies like Monte Hellman's Two Lane Blacktop (1971), or aged record covers--as in Union City Blues, Brooklyn, New York, 2004, a shot of a tall, thin, and shabby Williams crossing a street towards an American flag painted on a garage door. This work also brings to mind Warhol's line: "[I]f you see a person who looks like your teenage fantasy walking down the street, it's probably not your fantasy, but someone who had the same fantasy as you and decided instead of getting it or being it, to look like it . . . Just think about all the James Deans and what it means."

Warhol may have had swaggering more than stoned in mind, but Quawson's work does explore the reinvention of hip. Specifically, it does so in ways similar to the recently minted (and unfortunately named) pop music subgenre "freak folk." Finding formative influences in the music of their parents' generation, the neo-hippie participants in this scene plunder the sights and sounds of the 1970s as if the decade had never ended. Perhaps contemporary artists searching for something authentic and/or pastoral in the visual culture of the same period could be united under a similar heading. But it's hard to pinpoint the grounds of the phenomenon among so many different voices. Do the '70s really resonate so strongly with our own era? Or is it that we just can't treat those years as history quite yet? Nevertheless, a reading of Quawson's photographs alone within this framework would be reductive.

Lush and warm, these images are not only alluring but rife with complexities. We see the free-spirited family doing everyday things, but ultimately they remain elusive, their personalities remote. This quality is most apparent in Camper, Upstate New York , 2004, wherein the clearly exhausted young mother and her daughters appear lost in thought at the kitchen table of a small trailer, while a pile of dirty dishes rests in the cramped space behind them. In focusing so intensely on Williams and her children, Quawson introduces and achieves a sensitive study of parenthood, the lasting value of which transcends its incidentally modish look.

 

May 2008:

Adrian Piper
Elizabeth Dee Gallery

For her first solo show in New York after a seven-year hiatus, influential first-generation Conceptualist Adrian Piper, known for infusing her rigorous practice with the concerns of identity politics, focused on impermanence and loss. Piper presented a selection from a series begun in 2003 titled "Everything," short for "Everything will be taken away," a chilling apocalyptic statement that is inscribed on most of the works. The show was thrilling and disturbing but above all confounding; there was nothing here to indicate why she had been quiet for so long. But that, it seemed, was part of the point.

On entering the gallery, visitors encountered Everything #19.2, 2007, a mesmerizing video featuring two news clips (sourced from YouTube and drained of color and sound), that recount the kidnapping, rape, and torture last year of an African-American woman, Megan Williams, by six white West Virginians. The work obliquely references the media's shamefully inadequate coverage of this crime, an act of violence that prompted outrage across the country. However, Everything #19.1, 2007, an entire wall painted with the first published reportage of Williams's case--an article from the Associated Press that neglects to mention the location of the offense--gestures toward this silence more directly.

Two installations, both presented on long walls and featuring wallpaper printed with the phrase EVERYTHING WILL BE TAKEN AWAY, bracketed Everything #19.1 and imparted valuable historical context. To the left, printed very faintly, was Everything #18, 2007, which features images of pages from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in a grid around a tombstone-shaped recess (Everything #5, 2007). To the right was Everything #6, 2007, which features images of the faces of six assassinated American leaders, from Lincoln to RFK. On a separate wall facing the Williams text was Everything #9.1, 2007, a grid of nine prints. Five of these images, including snapshots of a cat on a bed, a window, and a doorway, have been scrubbed to the point of near-eradication with steel and rubber, and form an X around four images of demolished homes and floods caused by Hurricane Katrina. Complex and somber, the room, like much of the show, felt like a memorial.

Although these works made their debut here, New Yorkers might recall reading Piper's phrase before. In late 2006, four partially erased personal photographs featuring the forbidding mantra cropped up in a group show at this gallery. For Everything #10, 2006, which Piper produced last May for the public art nonprofit organization Creative Time, it was painted backwards on volunteers' foreheads in henna, confronting them with a slow-dissolving memento mori every time they looked in a mirror. In this show, however, text and its accompanying imagery offered a scathing, multilayered critique of American racism. By coolly recalling recent natural disasters and man-made atrocities, as if to mimic our own distance from them or "perform" the media's offhand treatment, Piper subtly highlights the fine line between private and public loss and how deeply the knife cuts both ways.

Through a mixture of openness and aloofness, then, Piper's new work examines issues of race, sex, class, and ethics, but perhaps most intriguingly of all, also incorporates the Hindu philosophies behind the artist's long-standing yoga practice. The lone quote Piper offers in the press release notes her detachment from "all the relationships, communities, values, and practices that make anomaly and ostracism possible." While the connection between Piper's new work and her supposed distancing from such divisiveness is murky at this point, one hopes that her return to New York was more than fleeting. Because although Piper seems to prefer living off the art world grid, what is her absence but a major loss?

 

April 2008:

Alex Hubbard
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery

In his seminal 1956 essay "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," Allan Kaprow praises Pollock's use of everyday materials, noting that his "so-called dance of dripping" is ultimately more interesting and influential than his canvases themselves. "Pollock, as I see him," writes Kaprow, "left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life. . . . Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch." More than fifty years later, these ideas resonate in the feverish videos of Brooklyn-based artist Alex Hubbard, who assembles, manipulates, and ultimately destroys elaborate painterly surfaces made from everyday objects.

In the five videos that comprised the bulk of his first New York solo show, Hubbard uses flowers, balloons, plastic letters, and other mundane things in bizarre, at times aggressive ways, calling attention to their purpose and altering them through a series of vaudevillian maneuvers. Each video is shot from overhead in a single take, delineating a flat surface against which the drama unfolds. The fast-moving Cinéopolis, 2007, depicts the tarring and feathering of a projector screen lying on the floor. Shiny Mylar balloons billow over the screen, only to be deflated by a blow torch; tar pours over the entire tableau; pillows are cut open so that their feathers flurry around, and finally the pictured screen rolls partially shut.

Though the link to Kaprow (whose work was once described by Susan Sontag as "animated collage") is palpable, Hubbard's videos also evoke a handful of other artists. Stuart Sherman, William Wegman, Bas Jan Ader, and Roman Signer all come to mind, for their experimental use of humor, bathos, and suspense. However, Hubbard's work is most in sync with Ader's slapstick film performances, which tend to end abruptly in humorously disastrous ways. Hubbard raises the comic ante by peppering the diegetic clamor with popping, buzzing sound effects to confuse what we see and hear. Moreover, by creating a short script and allowing for some unscripted divergence, he creates works that fall somewhere between Jackass and legerdemain.

Hubbard also presented two untitled abstract paintings and a collage, all of which appeared as codas to the videos. A deflated, tortured balloon affixed to the collage, ostensibly a remnant from Cinéopolis, seemed to symbolize other sad objects in the videos that are eventually nullified or swept away. Hubbard's unremitting stockpiling and effacement in these works gave the show a caustic, endgame-like spirit. While he displays an appetite for destruction, his visually seductive videos trump entropy with action. All is energetic and in constant motion, and a few fleeting scenes are remarkably beautiful in their colorful density. These moments occur through particularly strange and deadpan maneuvers such as the blowtorching of birthday balloons and the Saran-wrapping of pink plastic letters, and through the series title "The Collapse of the Expanded Field." Still, it's hard not to think of the final resting place of Hubbard's objects, the landfill. His work turns on this paradox--so funny it's sad and so sad it's funny--and it is this contradiction that allows some existential truth and gravitas to seep in.

 

March 2008:

Molly Springfield
Mireille Mosler, Ltd.

For her first solo show in New York, Molly Springfield took a page from the history of Conceptual art . . . literally. The ten graphite drawings presented meticulously depict photocopies from three major books on the language- and idea-based art of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The drawings were delicately pinned to the wall of one gallery, and from a distance they do indeed resemble poor-quality, toner-heavy Xeroxes. Springfield's work is not primarily an attempt at trompe l'oeil, however, but rather aims to mine issues of representation and appropriation. Her life-size reproductions highlight certain artists and authors while meditating on the aesthetic dimension of Conceptual art.

The title of the show, "The world is full of objects"--a reference to Douglas Huebler's ironic 1969 statement, "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more," which Springfield rendered from Ursula Meyer's Conceptual Art, 1972--belies her interest in making drawings. Perhaps a more appropriate title might have been a borrowing from Lawrence Weiner's poetic text work that examines the links between producing conceptual objects and words, A BIT OF MATTER AND A LITTLE BIT MORE, 1976. The exhibition included reproductions of the back and front covers of a library copy of Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson's Conceptual Art: a Critical Anthology, 1999, the contents page from Lucy Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, 1973, and the illustration credits page from the former. The series looked less like individual works and more like an installation of a disassembled artist's book.

Anyone familiar with the tomes that Springfield uses (both totemic and beloved in their way) might identify with her impulse to duplicate the pages. These books offer examples of seminal Conceptual works, like Lee Lozano's General Strike Piece, 1969; the presence of Springfield's hand throughout General Strike Piece, 2007, precariously and painstakingly tracing Lozano's handwriting, does little, however, to evoke Lozano's importance. (In penning this text, Lozano formalized her gradual withdrawal from the art world as an ongoing work.) However visually interesting, Springfield's exactingly executed drawings are too obsessively attentive to formal issues of shading and line, failing to approach what might be more interesting questions, such as why Lozano and others have been, at least until very recently, excluded from the canons of Conceptual art. Springfield's mimetic reproduction removes the urgency and self-critical potency from Lozano's original, dulling General Strike Piece to a crooked copy at multiple removes from its source. Certainly, Springfield must have foreseen this result, and thus have had an ironic effect in mind. But one gets the feeling that toeing the line between irony and piety isn't Springfield's point.

Early Conceptual artists used photocopiers to quickly distribute an promote their work, but this ultimately isn't Springfield's interest, either. Instead, more convoluted issues of what it means to copy a copy--especially if the original artwork is itself a photocopy--are at play. By recalling but not reiterating the significance of works by Huebler, Lozano, Sol LeWitt, and Mary Kelly, Springfield's drawings do little to provide insight into the extraordinary conditions of possibility and renewal that prevailed in the late-60s or, for that matter, into the peculiarities of our own era.

 

January 2008:

Kristin Lucas
Postmasters Gallery

Recently, a friend remarked to me that she was experiencing her Saturn return--an astrological phenomenon that happens about once every thirty years when, after orbiting the sun, the planet returns to the place it was when a person was born. Her feelings of trepidation, the changes in her life, and her description of the ominous effect lead us to the following, from newage-directory.com: "While undergoing your Saturn Return you may find yourself turning inward and reflecting on your individual destiny. You examine your true needs and desires and the role you want to play on the world's stage." The definition came to mind while visiting San Francisco-based Kristin Lucas's third solo exhibition at Postmasters, which, as if the artist were experiencing her own Saturn return, teemed with anxiety, longing, discovery, and a little divination.

There were plenty of acrylic comets and sand-colored fiberglass rocks to make the show feel interplanetary, too. These were interspersed throughout the first gallery in Whatever Your Mind Can Conceive (all works 2007), a three-channel video installation projected onto two large wooden roadside billboards and a fiberglass cast of an old computer monitor, so as to create the illusion that the video is playing on its obsolete screen. The installation takes its title from a moment in one of the vignettes in which the artist, playing a retired bingo caller with a ghastly rash, visits a hypnotherapist, who instructs her, "Whatever your mind can conceive . . . it can achieve." Meanwhile, on the other screens, Lucas is seen wandering around uneasily--in search, perhaps, of something to conceive and achieve, though it is unclear whether she ever finds it. These videos depict her framed against a desert backdrop in northern California, gazing at the camera (sans rash), blocking the sun from her face, and trying to impart instructions for breathing exercises, as wind buffeting the camera's microphone and a gentle piano melody alternate as a sound track.

Though the videos' non-narrative structure obscures the meaning of the artist's rash, her agitation and consequent metaphysical journey, as well as the installation's sense of disconnection and isolation, contributed to the psychosomatic-technological thematic of the show as a whole. (The press release states, cryptically, that the rash, which we see Lucas applying while looking in a mirror, "functions as an antenna for receiving bingo call numbers.") Less woolly, a series of photographic self-portraits displayed on light boxes imagine the effects of a technological virus, while extending Lucas's previous interest in combining the technological and the corporeal. Like an abject cyborg zombie, Lucas appears half-alive in these images, in a state of digital decay.

The most engaging work in the show was in the second gallery. If the installation and photographs attempt to convey a sense of transformation, Refresh, a collection of documents and drawings related to Lucas's recent government-issued name "change"--from Kristin Lucas to Kristin Lucas--in an effort to "reload" her identity like a webpage, most clearly drives this point home. An announcement of the hearing taken from the Oakland Tribune, drawings of Lucas in front of the judge, and a transcript of their conversations, in which the judge apprehensively grants Lucas's request, are intriguing. Accompanying the work here was a multi-part installation, titled Before and After , consisting of portraits of Lucas commissioned from artist friends. Should the "refreshed" Lucas decide to further test the boundaries of her aesthetic practice in the realm of everyday life in this way, it would herald a fascinating step forward.