print Summer 1998

Michael Ashkin

For a number of years Michael Ashkin has been producing tabletop tableaux that depict distinctive aspects of the contemporary American landscape: nearly barren postindustrial sites, stretches of desolate highway, and other fringe areas. These precise dioramas comprise terrains fashioned from plaster, cement, dirt, salt, and other substances, and bodies of water of poured Envirotex, a resinlike liquid that hardens to a slightly translucent coat. The occasional car, power line, and spigot might be purchased from hobby shops, and everything is constructed to exacting scale. Ashkin’s style has become

print May 1998

John Brill

Several generations after the pictorialist aesthetic, which first asserted photography’s claim to the status of art, was banished by straight photography’s insistence on the objective rendering of form and the unmanipulated shot, blurry, evanescent images have resurfaced as a major mode of picture making. John Brill’s recent series “ennui” constitutes a self-conscious attempt at a contemporary pictorialism. The photographer has said that this body of work “continues and takes to the extreme my exploration of the subjective and equivocal nature of meaning. . . . Eschewing and ultimately freed

print March 1998

Robert Beck

Robert Beck’s recent exhibition was a show of fragments, both in the sense that some of the individual pieces were components of larger, thematically based installations, and more important, in that each work comprised one term in an extended network of signification. The ten drawings contain figure numbers and references to sources ranging from a psychoanalytic tract by Lacan to a catalogue of hunting gear; some refer to narratives of the artist’s invention. They were grouped with four Polaroids: an architectural detail, a blank brick wall, a man lying with arm outstretched in a log cabin, and

print December 1997

Reverend Ethan Acres

For those of you who thought camp was dead, Reverend Ethan Acres has arrived to demonstrate that it was just festering in the open wound that is Las Vegas. Acres, recently featured in “The Vegas Show” at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, is the product of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The art world’s current focus on Las Vegas seems to be another sad attempt to recapture some of the glitz and instant marketability of the ’80s. This strategy takes a page directly from pop music by promoting a form of regionalism—searching for an art-world equivalent of Minneapolis or Seattle.

Acres has all the

print Summer 1997

Robert Blanchon

Rosalind Krauss once noted that the sea is a special medium for Modernism because of its isolation, self-sufficiency, and detachment from the social; it promises a limitless visual plenitude, yet is characterized by an insistent sameness. Robert Blanchon has recently photographed the sea as one of three interrelated series that were on view at the Marc Foxx gallery: “Wave (0-9),” “Tree (0-9),” and “Rock (0-9)” (all 1996). Consisting of ten identically presented photographs of individual waves, trees, and rocks, each series seeks to create a tension between a transcendent vision of Modernism and

print January 1997

Ragna Berlin and Michelle Segre

It’s rare to find a two-person gallery show that seems more like a collaboration than a pair of solo exhibitions. This show of works by Swedish artist Ragna Berlin and New Yorker Michelle Segre was such an exception. Not only did the pieces fit together visually, almost becoming a single large installation, but seeing them in this context supplied a narrative dimension to their work that might have been lacking otherwise. Berlin’s installation was in two parts— Spot, 1996, an enormous brown dot painted on much of the gallery floor and two walls, and Mlob, 1996, an accompanying audio piece that

print September 1996

Charles Long

Playing on the famous ’70s feminist book Our Bodies, Our Selves, Charles Long’s recent exhibition “Our Bodies, Our Shelves” takes as a starting point his own body and significant childhood experiences. The intentionally bad pun of the title announces Long’s investigation of the connection between corporeality and identity, between body and self. The show was divided into two groups of work: anthropomorphically rounded blobs (bodies) in a variety of high-tech plastics and tactile rubber and flock shelves (selves) that bent and curved so as to belie their functional roots. The origin of the blobs

print April 1996

Udomsak Krisanamis

Udomsak Krisanamis’ most recent series of collage paintings represent, on one level, a continuation of an earlier series of drawings that began with his arrival in this country from Thailand several years ago. Those drawings literalized the way he learned English: by reading the daily newspaper. Udomsak would take a pencil and cross out each word he understood, so that what began as vast fields of print with only an occasional graphite mark, progressed, along with the artist’s increasing knowledge of English, into allover fields of thickly layered graphite out of which an unknown word occasionally

print September 1995

Keith Broadwee

In Keith Boadwee’s most recent series, the body is the locus for an investigation into the history of abstract painting. This work continues a project that stems from the beginning of his career when he used himself as a canvas for quasi-Expressionist paintings, taking Yves Klein’s technique for painting the female nude one step further—and closer. Increasingly, his paintings have isolated individual body parts, particularly the penis and the anus. While in Boadwee’s work the penis has always remained flaccid and uneroticized, the asshole is elaborately decorated, a site of pleasure. Two earlier

print December 1995

Gary Simmons

Taking his 1993 series “Erasure” as a point of departure, Gary Simmons created a monumental yet lyrical suite of site-specific wall drawings. The earlier series—30 works that resembled old-fashioned blackboards with partially erased chalk drawings derived from cartoons ranging from the well-known Dumbo to the little known “Bosko” serials—was a means of marking the “violence done to Black people both in the creation of these images and [in] life.” To achieve this effect, Simmons isolated selected cartoon characters and reduced the images until they became indices of visual stereotypes: a frog is

print April 1995

Toba Khedoori

Toba Khedoori’s work is located in the gap between opposing strains of Modernism, between the optical and the constructed, the sublimated and the desublimated, the horizontal and the vertical, the floor and the wall. In her first solo exhibition, the artist presented three immense paintings on paper, each constructed of three panels stapled together and to the wall, which they nearly covered. These works are created in and marked by two distinct stages of production. Khedoori begins on the floor, melting wax onto the paper and then sponging it across in thin translucent layers; she then raises

print January 1995

Joel Otterson

The embodiment of suburban rebellion, Joel Otterson’s work seems particularly apt in Los Angeles, the most suburban of major American cities. Here the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle gives no indication of ever having died; witness the nightly parade of bleached-blond, slickly made-up glam kids and dirtier, track-marked Guns ’n’ Roses wanna-bes across Hollywood Boulevard. Otterson seems intent on domesticating this rebellion by creating heavy-metal home furnishings that stress opulence and comfort. This makes perfect sense; after all no one ever fantasized about smashing up the interior of a Motel 6.

In

Andrew Perchuk