print February 1995

Hilary Harp

Part of “The Challenge Exhibitions” (a series of juried shows inaugurated in 1978 that provides young artists with the opportunity to show their work), Hilary Harp’s exhibition of interactive sculptures owed as much to a childlike fascination with Americana as to the punning spirit of Marcel Duchamp. Taking Duchamp’s precept that the observer must complete the work of art literally, these ultimately metaphysical constructions require the viewer’s physical interaction. Sunrise, 1994—a miniature, stagelike landscape—hung from the wall, against which a translucent paper sun rose and fell as the

print November 1994

Keith Ragone

While Keith Ragone may position himself outside the ongoing conversation about whether painting is alive or dead, witnessing the obvious attachment of the artist to his practice, one wonders whether these nostalgic images are enlightened gestures or stunning anachronisms. Ragone’s paintings are not inventions that speak of this moment, nor do they reinvent, in a customary way, a moment from the past; there is no irony, no real distance in his investigation. Though traces of the explorations of artists such as Willem de Kooning, Hans Hoffmann, and Arshile Gorky linger in Ragone’s works, he seems

print Summer 1994

Stuart Netsky

In a series of black and white photographs, “What Should I Wear?,” 1993, Stuart Netsky changes his pose as often as his dress, creating coy, honest, then decidedly camp self-portraits. It was as if the artist were watching us watching him press against the cultural boundaries of gender identity. Seen before the installation, Time Flies, 1993, the portraits served as a prelude to the extended dialogue of that piece.

The installation was like a bizarre salon, museumlike in its considered arrangements, but illumined by a garish, violet glare borrowed from after-hours clubs. Unfolding around a large

print April 1994

A. P. Gorny

A. P. Gorny opened this show with an extended performance that served as a frame for his highly textured conflation of event and image, one composed of layers of art-historical, religious, and deeply personal iconographies. “If You Only Knew” had an academic beginning: an artist’s conversation in a lecture hall on the college campus, which came to an abrupt halt when a drummer beckoned Gorny out of the building and down a long hill to the exhibition site. The audience followed. Outside of the gallery, a few of Gorny’s students fed a bright fire from a pile of his drawings. The light and warmth

print December 1993

Susan Fenton

This recent exhibition of Susan Fenton’s painted photographs presented two bodies of work, one produced in France and one in Japan, where the artist is now living. Place has always been a factor in Fenton’s work, a subtext that underlies the immediately apparent subject matter and marks the extent of her experience in foreign places. The artist’s first important work evolved while she was living in Rome—the city became a source for the ritualized, ceremonial attitudes of her figures and the objects that accompany them.

Fenton’s general practice consists first of a highly controlled studio

print April 1993

Terry Fox

Terry Fox was chosen as the first artist of the Moore International Discovery Series, a biennial exhibition planned for the next 20 years to feature artists given little exposure in this country. The first major exhibition in the United States of Fox’s work since 1973, “‘Articulations’ (Labyrinth/Text Works)” was a welcome reintroduction to an artist whose reputation was established underground in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Referred to as actions or demonstrations, his work was characterized by a ritualized, elemental force: the artist fasted and attempted levitation; bread, rose, and fish

print February 1993

Richard Torchia

Through his use of lenses, Richard Torchia explores the history of perceptual systems,simultaneously confirming the pleasures of the experiential moment and drawing on the tradition of the camera obscura. In two earlier installations, Torchia invited the viewer into the “dark room” where he placed lenses in an exterior wall to reveal the world outside in a dizzying (in)version of reality. His recent, site-specific installation, Birds of the Commonwealth, A Peepshow, 1992, reflected a new level of control over the world his lenses might illuminate—here, Torchia included references to trompe l’oeil

print November 1992

Bill Walton

A contradictory relationship to a Minimalist esthetic creates both visual tension and much that is poetically demanding in Bill Walton’s new work. In an exhibition entitled “Letters, Memos,” 13 pieces were divided into two rooms, each offering a different perspective on installation art, and a variation on ways of recording and communicating fragments of experience. The viewer’s response to the objects, apparently simple geometric forms, was partly determined by the physical aspects of the installation. Individually, the piece tracked the relationship between memory and experience; collectively,

print September 1992

Susan Chrysler White

Susan Chrysler White’s mixed-media pieces explore both esthetic and political issues through multiple visual vocabularies. The images in the drawings at the heart of these pieces evolve through elaborate material manipulations that relate female sexual organs to botanical fragments, Italian eel traps, and circular rings. In some of the larger pieces, such as Catacomb and Codex, both 1992, the uniform size, scale, and presentation of the varied drawings (12-by-17-inch units, attached in a gridlike framework) make possible larger formal and political statements.

Codex emphasizes the verticality of

print May 1992

Daisy Youngblood

Experiencing Daisy Youngblood’s sculptures is like making eye contact with an animal in the wild. This selection of 12 works, dating from 1980 to the present, depicts both animal and human figures whose thin, clay bodies are poetically as well as materially vulnerable; sometimes, human and animal characteristics are reconfigured in a single piece to compelling effect. The ultimate power of this work is in its unique physical presence, which establishes itself not so much as objects of art do, but, rather, as ancient, mysterious forms in which we recognize ourselves. Youngblood creates this

print March 1992

Ray Johnson

“More Works by Ray Johnson: 1951–1991” presents a representative selection of drawings, collages, as well as a sprawling body of mail art. Given the comparative abundance and notoriety of the correspondence, the collages make a particularly strong impression here, revealing a refined, formal side of Johnson’s work that may not be familiar to most viewers; some are abstract and derive their poetry from his finely textured surfaces, others reveal a fluid engagement with pop-cultural images. The earliest of the latter sort predates Pop art’s beginning (as we traditionally date it) by a decade. The

print December 1991

Steven Beyer

Steven Beyer’s “Babies” embody a richly layered visual dialogue on the politics of sex, race, and religion. In this installation, Beyer presented six bronze putti—three black and three white. These works are part of a series of ten in which five distinct gestures are realized in both black and white finishes. The extremely formal and exaggeratedly elegant presentation is ultimately ironic, as it serves to establish conventions that the artist questions and undermines. These putti constitute a sharp departure from the Western traditions from which they are drawn, as they all have African-American

Eileen Neff