Big Bang Theory

Robin Rice on Visual Art

by Robin Rice

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Published: Jan 19, 2011

The two groups of work on view this month at Locks Gallery are typical — in different ways — of the post-holiday season. Most pieces in "Alterations" (pictured), a group digital media show on the main floor, curated by visual artist Peter Campus, are too undomesticated for ordinary homes. Institutions may be interested, but few individuals would consider buying these pieces. Upstairs, more people will find things they'd love to own, but the mixed bag of visually attractive landscape-related paintings is not conceptually tight. It doesn't even have a real title.

Campus, a septuagenarian who has influenced generations of video and digital artists, occupies the physical and conceptual center of his group show. The videos he presents here are beautiful recent archetypal landscapes composed of ever-shifting, blurred but squared-off elements in resonant dark colors. It's impossible not to respond to them.

In contrast, an earnest installation of digital prints by Nayda Collazo-Llorens, "Aposiopesis," is only moderately engaging. The word refers to fragmentary or interrupted speech, generally construed to reflect an overexcited emotional state. But any sense of urgency is lacking. In a room populated by lively, active images, these smallish prints come across as an intellectual exercise.

In the case of Kathleen Graves, the manipulation of a specific vocabulary of static imagery (reclining child, butterfly, flower) into diverse scattered compositions suggests a narrative. Graves' real point may be that repeated images arbitrarily morph into linguistic codes. We expect them to tell a story, so we make one up.

Not with a whimper but a bang is Jason Varone's pairing of a simplistic wall painting — a meandering pictogram of a river — with monochrome low-tech video that includes text. The subject seems to be illegal border-crossing in Arizona. Bizarrely, the installation has acquired unanticipated narrative context and energy from the recent shootings in Tucson.

Beryl Korot's 10-minute text-based Florence (Nightingale) digital video is the most compelling work apart from Campus'. Korot uses Nightingale's own words to build a poetic sense of aspiration, dedication and honor that is not precisely dependent on logic, narrative images or even complete sentences. A flowing, turbulent but grid-like setting effectively reinforces the piece.

Upstairs, two waterfall paintings by Pat Steir — at 70-plus inches tall, which is modest for her work — seem to echo the energy of Korot's video in bold, exuberant pours of paint. All the paintings in this eclectic gallery are large. The scale of space itself offers a perspective that permits the transformation from abstracted masses of color into recognizable imagery, before the paintings dissolve again into abstract patterns of smaller paint areas. We experience this transformation in Diane Burko's writhing Nunatak diptych. It revels in the flowing power of a spatial recession encompassing the frozen mountains that record and resist eons of geographical flux.

Severe straight edges define dark and light shapes to make Jennifer Bartlett's Bridge and Pond a record of human activity superimposed on nature. The most thought-provoking work, though, is Kate Bright's Grove. In this over-the-top cliché, swathes of real glitter mimic sparkling snow on tree branches. The painting's glamour and generic charm left one gallery visitor struggling to articulate how its beauty might be distinguished from the shallow attractions of Thomas Kinkade, whom she regards as the last nasty word in kitsch. Sorry, Clement Greenberg, regulating such distinctions is futile.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Alterations/Untitled Group of Gallery Artists | Through Feb. 5, Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Square South, 215-629-1000, locksgallery.com.

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