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11/6/2003

Plastic Gardens

Cristinerose Gallery, New York

Cristinerose | Josee Bienvenu Gallery is pleased to present Plastic Gardens. The exhibition includes eight artists: Noriko Ambe, Erica Baclawski, Louise Belcourt, Kelly Kaczynski, Stephen Galloway, Karen Margolis, Nobi S- and Julianne Swartz. Geographical terrains - mountains, caves, forests, and fields - provide both metaphorical and physical structures for the works in this exhibition. Plastic Gardens explores the psychological space between landscape and the body staging various levels of artifice, between mirror and mirage, fact and fantasy.

Kelly Kaczynski's mountain and bubble landscapes are made from extracted, composed and manipulated elements. Using an extreme material presence - complex wood scaffolding, metal structures, nylon bubbles, melted wax - the environment is built to imply a narrative yet the image is never completed. The works suggest miniature movie sets before the camera rolls.

Julianne Swartz's magnet sculptures are made of string, wire, and magnets. Titled Aimants, these abstract structures embody the complexities and tensions of relationships. They demonstrate the articulations of strength and vulnerability, of distance and intimacy by mapping fields of attraction/repulsion in space. A large installation titled 'How Deep is Your Love' is currently on view at PS1 in Queens, New York. Nobi S-, who has been developing projects in collaboration with the world's top perfumers since 1997, presents '100% LOVE', an olfactory floor installation. A multitude of small clear plastic cosmetic jars will be arranged on the floor in the shape of a heart which will be filled by a bed of shocking pink scented plastic beads. 100% LOVE is also the name of the scent created by legendary perfumer Sophia Grojsman (creator of Eternity for Calvin Klein, Paris for Yves Saint Laurent, etc...) and will soon be launched as a fragrance on the market. A caption reads: 'Portable Love for Free, No strings Attached' encouraging the audience to take a jar of beads.

Noriko Ambe maps the land between physical and emotional geography. She draws by cutting white paper with an exacto knife, carving complex streams of swirls and ripples into the multi-layered stacks. She stretches the properties of the materials to extreme lengths - in this case sheets of Yupo, a plastic based paper from Japan, to render elaborate topographies. Karen Margolis pushes sculpture into immateriality. She uses office supplies such as reinforcements, tracing paper and hole punchers to create works of great delicacy. Her perforated sheets of Mylar cast moving shadows on the walls and blur the boundaries between landscape and architecture, between solid and fluid.

Louise Belcourt constructs odd reductive images within the conventions of traditional landscape painting. Her gouaches on paper extract the sculptural qualities of the simple rectangular shapes of hedges. Nature, the sole protagonist, seems as synthetic as in those travel postcards where colors that are too intense and fake impart a weird sense of heightened reality.

Stephen Galloway transplants a redwood Californian forest to Chelsea. His life-size photographs of trees and foliage printed on translucent film are applied edge to edge on each pane of the five gallery windows overlooking 20th Street. Daylight illuminates the film from behind, creating an architectural scale lightbox.
The landscape is also a mirage in Erica Baclawski's paintings. While indulging in the trappings and conventions of the romantic legacy of landscape imagery the paintings draw attention to its artifice. The view is always experienced through a window; architecture is the omnipresent frame of the panorama. Titles reminiscent of pop songs; Separation Anxiety, Distance and Longing; Hooked on a Feeling; provoke a sense of disenchantment and removed sentimentality amplified by the cool unreal lighting.

Opening Reception: Thursday June 12, from 6 to 8pm

In the image: 'Bubble Mountain', 2003, epoxy, nylon,
plastic, wood, approx. 31 x 36 x 36 inches.
Kelly Kaczynski.

Cristinerose | Josee Bienvenu Gallery
529 West 20th Street
New York
212-206-0297

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