print Summer 1999

Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian’s recent work, documented in photographs and videotapes, consists of trivial or inept “repairs” to flora and fauna, suggesting the efforts of a clueless (if well-intentioned) field biologist. In Renovated Mushroom (Tip-Top Tire Rubber Patch Kit) (all works 1998), the naturally occurring cracks on mushroom surfaces have been fixed with multicolored tire patches, converting the caps into ridiculous-looking polka-dotted tuffets; in Transplant, a plant’s missing leaves have been replaced with membranous insect wings, restoring its symmetry but turning it into a part-animal,

print April 1999

Ross Knight

Ross Knight’s recent exhibition drew on influences spanning the socioeconomic spectrum: the emptied-out, less-is-more design of a tony, Minimalist-inspired loft; the lightweight, portable architecture of the corporate trade show; and the sloppy, catch-as-catch-can facture of the homeless encampment. The artist’s boxy, maquette-like constructions of corrugated vinyl sheeting, held together with Velcro or fastened onto armatures of aluminum piping, come in an array of basic shapes—rectangular solids, vertical planes, a prism standing on edge—all assembled as crudely as possible and adorned with

print January 1999

Georg Herold

The title of Georg Herold’s recent exhibition was a mouthful of cyberspeak—“compu.comp.virtual visualities.equivacs.bitmapdyes”—but anyone lured by this pidgin html into expecting a deep artistic investigation of the Web was in for a disappointment, since the show went no further than the graphic interface, the familiar sight that greets you when you turn on your computer. Stripes of concentrated watercolor on large sheets of photographic paper recalled the palettes of digital tool bars (or their low-tech cousins, paint samples from Home Depot), and strings of suspended wood blocks

print December 1998

Carl D'Alvia

Carl D’Alvia’s life-size plaster statues conjure an inspiring vision: The family that slays together stays together. “Dad” is a hulking brute in superhero garb who sits like Rodin’s Thinker, contemplating the high-powered machine gun grafted to his forearm (Bad Guy, 1997). “Mom,” a caped, spandexed hard-body with ten Shiva-like arms (Ms. Trouble, 1998), raises her own Gatling-gun prostheses in a cubistic reenactment of Robert De Niro’s Taxi Driver “You talkin’ to me?” routine. And between them “Junior”—a cyberdog with video-camera eye, external-hard-drive brain, and shoulder-mounted

print November 1998

Garry Gross

Fashion photographer Garry Gross had the idea, back in the freewheeling ’70s, of doing an arty piece about “the woman within the child,” to capture the “flirtatiousness” and “coquettishness” he observed in little girls. He hired an exceptionally lovely Ford model, age ten, and, after obtaining a release from her mother, photographed the tyke nude in a bathtub, decked out in makeup and jewelry and adopting a variety of slinky poses. For all their supposed playfulness, the photographs had the trappings of a standard soft-core porn shoot—billowing steam, spritzing shower head, telephone by

print September 1998

Rebecca Quaytman

Like a three-dimensional CD-Rom that substituted walking and looking for pointing and clicking, Rebecca Quaytman's exhibition abounded in links among and cross-references between the works, a line of hard-edged abstractions interspersed with photographs silkscreened onto wood panels. With its artworks, images of artworks, and images of people viewing artworks, the show was a sort of sustained inquiry on the subject of looking.

Quaytman is particularly attentive to how the gallery space influences the way we read what's on view. Near the entrance, the viewer found a blue monochrome, Going Here,

print Summer 1998

Howard Schwartzberg

In Howard Schwartzberg’s recent exhibition, paint acquires mass and volume and turns into a “thing,” an entity somewhere between post-Minimalist sculpture and B-movie prop. In Electric Lime (all works 1997), a bathtub’s worth of lime-green latex seems to fill an enormous burlap sack partially affixed to the wall. Expanding over the rim of the bag, the paint has hardened into a level surface suggesting a horizontal monochrome. Against an adjacent wall, a thick cerulean slab with a burlap rind titled A Quarter Cold Blue hugs the baseboards as if trying to make itself as inconspicuous as possible.

print April 1998

Michael Phelan

Michael Phelan’s exhibition “Bel-Aqua” invited us to contemplate a range of products that might best be described as implacably middlebrow: concentric flowerpots, a faux-granite water cooler, and a wall of blue spring-water bottles. These were interspersed in the coolly elegant installation among freestanding structures made of synthetic materials (Styrofoam planks, tubular shelving, plastic two-by-fours) that evoked swimming pools and exercise equipment, all amplifying the aquatic motif.

Several sculptures incorporate pale turquoise panels reminiscent of John McCracken’s flawless fiberglass

print January 1998

Devon Dikeou

Art about the art world is practically a genre unto itself, and a fairly limited one. We’ve seen paintings of art gallery advertisements, drawings of museum floor plans, bar graphs tabulating the output of famous Abstract Expressionists, and in Houston several years ago, a room full of large canvases with artists’ resumes silkscreened onto them, by a conceptualist named Mark Flood. Devon Dikeou’s recent installation, a series of signboards recording every group show she has participated in since 1991, resembled Flood’s, but had a formal obsessiveness that threatened to lift it out of this cozy

print November 1997

Max Estenger

Max Estenger’s recent exhibition was heavy on the one-liners: a framed announcement for Dan Flavin’s installation at the Calvin Klein store, equipped with a fluorescent “painting light”; an inflatable ottoman stuffed with a shredded Bible; aluminum panels imprinted with photos of Ted Kazcynski’s cabin and Harry Helmsley’s crypt. In Great Looking Hair (GLH Formula) (all works 1997), a line of clear plastic, wall-mounted domes conjured the space-age Minimalism of Donald Judd or Larry Bell, but the monochromatic earth colors (black, light brown, auburn, silver, and so on) coating the insides of

print November 1997

Denyse Thomasos

Using a flat brush an inch or so in width, Denyse Thomasos applies bands of thinned-down acrylic paint to canvas in a relentless crisscrossing motion, building up dense, kaleidoscopic records of the process. The hatching is loose and gestural in her small-scale works, but as the paintings become larger (up to 10 by 16 feet), the grids grow stiffer, even volumetric, suggesting rows of stylized buildings. Some of her lines are uncannily straight, as if made by a monomaniacal sign painter, while others are erratic, leaving drips that complicate (and energize) the skewed cubic forms.

Compared to

print May 1997

Michael Smith and Joshua White

In this exhaustively detailed, tragicomic installation, collaborators Michael Smith and Joshua White transformed the gallery into an office and showroom for MUSCO (pronounced “muse-co”), a once-thriving lighting business now headed for Chapter II. As explained in a promotional video running continuously on the “sales floor,” the fictional company supplied equipment for psychedelic light shows in the ’60s, “responded to the needs of the burgeoning disco culture” in the ’70s, then adapted its products to the corporate setting in the ’80s. Sadly, items such as the “loft lamp” and “interior/exterior

Tom Moody