print February 1996

Robin Kahn

Robin Kahn’s work as an editor and an artist has entailed a close monitoring of the legacy of creative endeavors undertaken by women; at the same time she has continued to develop her own host of political themes. In Time Capsule: A Concise Encyclopedia by Women Artists, a hefty anthology she conceived and edited in 1995, writings and drawings submitted by women from around the world were arranged according to a charged lexicon, from “abstract porno” to “veils.” In this show of six paintings and a sculpture addressing female stereotypes in realms of fashion, the body, and labor, Kahn carried

print January 1996

Tanya Marcuse

Tanya Marcuse’s second solo show consisted of surreal, uniformly sized platinum/palladium prints drawn from two different bodies of work. One of these, the picture cycle “Bridal Suite” (all works 1995), commemorated her wedding day: everything from the bridal gown to the bride’s intimate apparel to a concluding peek at distinctly private acts. Formally and in its preoccupation with representations of the body, this series echoed Marcuse’s first solo show for which the artist photographed fragments of classical Greek sculpture—bits of male and female bodies posed in galleries or sequestered away

print November 1995

Elliott Puckette

Wood panels covered in a sparse tracery of calligraphic lines, Elliott Puckette’s works are ethereal. Her latest efforts are named for great winds, Sirocco, 1995, and Harmattan, 1995, while in another work, Hala, 1994, the thin white lines that cling to empty space echo the surface roots of the eponymous Hawaiian tree. Throughout these paintings, darkened grounds appear to have been scrubbed over gesso with a soft cloth or brush. Light soaks back through translucent veils of ink, creating an effect similar to the glint of pale stones from the bottom of a pool at night. This serenity, which can

print October 1995

Claude Simard

Dominating Claude Simard’s installation, a string of letters cascaded down one wall of the exhibition space. Cut from cotton, stuffed, stitched, and strung like fish on a line, they were hung in so many layers that it was difficult to decipher the individual names they spelled. This overwhelming cacophony was meant to evoke a particular place—a small French Canadian village called Larouche, from which this New York–based artist hails—through the names of its denizens. Simard also portrayed his hometown in photographs of its inhabitants in moments of leisure and of local landmarks, such as the

print September 1995

Dorothy Cross

With slight but unnerving displacements, Dorothy Cross transforms the pristine space of the gallery into sometimes erotic, sometimes terrifying environments. Her most recent installation, Inheritance, 1995, began with an isolated X ray of a skull. Nestled in the brainpan, as if in a womb, was an unborn child. This image could be read in two ways: either as a metaphor for the coming generation, whose traits are bound to be as much an imprint of psychological as of physical union; or, on a more macabre note, as signs of new life encased in a symbol of death. This ambiguity set the tone of the

print September 1995

Andrei Roiter

A Russian artist who divides his time between Amsterdam and New York, Andrei Roiter seems to have cultivated a talent for making himself at home. In his recent show, he inhabited the institutional architecture of the Zilkha Gallery with the resourcefulness of a castaway on a desert island, transforming the inhospitable concrete and carpeted spaces into an art-friendly environment. The installation, Potato Head, 1995, consisted of a series of drawings and photographs encircling the main gallery, and a selection of paintings and sculpture hung in the smaller, chapellike rotunda. A number of works

print Summer 1995

Polly Apfelbaum

Polly Apfelbaum combines a Depression-era resourcefulness with an almost compulsive need to acquire material goods. Her witty, neo-Minimalist works are comprised of sera ps of crushed velvet, snapshots, pieces of felt, and bedsheets worn soft and thin that are dyed, chopped up, and reassembled into quilts or laid out in methodical rows, Victory Garden style. Apfelbaum’s most recent exhibition featured four series of works on paper and three stained-fabric constructions that sit somewhere between painting and sculpture, such as Ashes III, 1993–95, in which petals of velvet, sooty with ink, accrue

print Summer 1995

Robin Hill

For this exhibition of new sculptures and drawings, Robin Hill made four thousand casts of paper cups and dyed them ballpoint-pen blue. Unlike Bruce Nauman’s cast of the underside of a chair, Hill’s casts make no attempt to evoke the thing itself through its negative; rather, they chart an open territory. Lined up to create patterns that wheel and spin across the floor, Hill’s uniform units suggest a gargantuan spirograph. There were three sculptures formed from lots of casts, all untitled, taking over most of the floor space. These sculptures were all quite gracious—lots of floor shone through—and

print May 1995

Doug Martin

Of late, there has been much ado about mapping in Manhattan. Curator Robert Storr mounted his ode to the cartographic at the Museum of Modern Art last fall, prompting a counter-exhibition at the SoHo gallery American Fine Arts. Both shows clearly demonstrated that mapping is more than a means of navigating space, indeed in the hands of an artist it often becomes a quasi-conceptual mode of representation.

Offering a somewhat different spin on this now well-trodden territory, Doug Martin often paints directly on the maps he selects, teasing the cartographer’s lines into his own territorial vignettes

print April 1995

Lorna Bieber

Culled from vintage sources—decorator’s magazines circa the late ’40s and early ’50s—Lorna Bieber’s photographs of interiors map the domestic landscape of America. The views they present evoke the rise of the American middle class, the era just before the parlor was turned into a TV room. The coziness of these rooms—crammed with side tables and protected from drafts by drapes in every window—is keenly offset by a sense of dissatisfaction with the overall decor, a combination of French provincial and “country living.” In Chairs, 1994, the tripartite imagery seems to document the gaze of a decorator

print March 1995

Maureen Connor

With this survey of Maureen Connor’s sculpture comes a shift in the discussion generated by artists such as Janine Antoni, Patti Martori, and Rachel Whiteread, all of whom can be said to have used Minimalist strategies and esthetics to feminist ends. In “Discreet Objects,” curated by Andrew Perchuk at the Alternative Museum, it became apparent that though Connor may have begun her career in dialogue with Minimalist sculpture, she was always more concerned with examining cultural paradigms of femininity than with formal issues.

The show included works from the ’70s in one gallery and more recent

print February 1995

Kim Dingle

Surrounded by teddy bears and lawn geese, chubby baby girls romp against cheery wallpaperlike grounds in Kim Dingle’s series of paintings, “the priss papers,” 1994. But Dingle isn’t after a storybook, nurseryroom atmosphere. These pictures are lushly and pleasurably naughty—a sure sign that somebody has been toying with desire. This is not the work of a well-behaved artist who colors inside the lines. Taking the girlish activity of drawing into the traditionally masculine realm of painting, Dingle’s line is all sensual brushwork. This hybrid of drawing and painting makes for unconventional

Ingrid Schaffner