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3/3/2004

Sandra Bermudez

Lyons Wier, New York

Be Mine

In her work to date, New York artist Sandra Bermudez has explored the network of codes and conventions associated with love and sex primarily through a focus on an actual physical human body - her own. Subverting the brutally restricted language of mainstream pornography, she has set a series of visual traps that encourage us to question persistent assumptions about the significatory power of female flesh. Using close-up photography to isolate body parts from their immediate context, she has proved able to introduce an uncertainty over function - both actual and symbolic - that collapses a stinging feminist critique into lush formal beauty. Her titles have often been important in solidifying this connection; the Pillow series (2001) draws a comparison between wrinkled skin and crumpled bed linen (layering all the connotations of each) while I Miss You, I Need You and I Want You (all 2001) reinvest a mouth made alien by manipulations of color and framing with the capacity for verbal seduction.
Retaining her fundamental concerns, Bermudez has chosen recently to apply the strategies with which she has become adept to a somewhat broader arena of images and objects. An outwardly eclectic selection, these nonetheless all refer to human relationships and their filtration through distorting commercial (read, for the most part, male) interests. Her newest work - less overtly anatomical than before, more caught up with dramatic moments and the magic of words - borders on the allusive, quasi-mystical contemporary mode that Jorg Heiser has termed "romantic conceptualism"[1] Yet it also displays a hard post-Pop edge, a high gloss that immediately dissipates any sentimental tendency. Bermudez is not a cynic - far from it - but she is rightfully suspicious.

In David Lynch's Twin Peaks, 1989, characters emerge into the suspended space of dream through red curtains, the act of letting heavy velvet fall together behind them confirming, in a way that simply closing a door could never do, that they have left the waking world behind. And just as in Lynch's hands the curtain takes on a dark eroticism, so Bermudez places it in a context that ensures the impossibility of our reading it as a signifier of harmless make-believe. The spotlight in her Red Curtain (Archival Digital Print, 40" x 60") illuminates a split from which we anticipate that someone or something is about to emerge. The image is static but so familiar and potent is the scenario, the weight of expectation remains. It is at once frustrating and satisfying, denying our immediate desire for revelation but offering instead an endless space for imagination. Its theatricality suggests that whatever scenario we might come up with is bound to be a performance, an exaggeration, a fantasy. Reduced to its formal components, the image is almost Minimalist, virtually abstract. Yet while there is very little, visually, to pull apart, what is seen stands at the beginning of a narrative virtually without limits.

Be and Mine (it is telling that the phrase is presented as two separate works, a frank admission that every declaration of love is haunted by the possibility of separation) extend that narrative into the realm of verbal language. In magnifying a cliche of romantic hot air until it is physically unavoidable, Bermudez teases us with our own linguistic laziness. Here is a phrase that has become, literally, weightless, buoyed up on currents of implication and assumption. Like Warhol's balloons, the works have their playful side, but the celebration feels cautious, muted in spite of the glitz. These are very grown-up toys, armored in glamorous sophistication. Recalling Jeff Koons' Rabbit, 1986, their silvered surfaces, in reflecting everything around them (not least our own gaze) negate their very substance. Expecting an easy generosity, we are offered only front.

Bermudez makes use of sloganeering again in a trio of photographs titled May 86, Aug 92 and Oct 01, (2002, Archival Digital Prints, 20" x 20") which depict her own palms inscribed with the words You are my love, Love me, Love you, and Love forever. These phrases (which are rubber-stamped, though they have the muted colors of old tattoos) overlap and obscure each other in an inky web that becomes denser as the sequence progresses. In Untitled (I do not always feel colored), 1990, Glenn Ligon images the struggle to make oneself heard in an racist culture by stencilling the same (loaded) phrase again and again until it becomes illegible, a muffled cry. Similarly, Bermudez examines the way in which we become numbed by the repetition of certain constructions, how their meaning diminishes with familiarity. There is also an implication that to communicate intense emotion is to destroy its purity, to muddy it with the confusion and compromise of the real world. Bermudez's photographs present these contradictions as inherent but endlessly mutable, timeless yet always newly shocking.

In House and Garage, 2000, British video artists Oliver Payne and Nick Relph kick a fireworks display into reverse gear, plucking rockets from the air in a gleeful acting-out of mean spirits. Bermudez's manipulation in her video Fireworks is even simpler, in the context she creates, perhaps even more affecting. The footage that she edits and loops, like the original photograph reproduced as Red Curtain and the balloons in Be and Mine, was purchased ready-made. That the artist's primary role was one of researcher,

selector and presenter - rather than also as fabricator - might hardly be worth pointing out were it not for the singular appropriateness of this process to the conceptual nature of her project. Fireworks, like all Bermudez's work, stands in for an emotional paradox. It represents an outburst of feeling that lights up its surroundings yet is apparently unsustainable, one that seems spontaneous yet seems, somehow, to be repeatable. The true nature of Bermudez's critique thus transcends the cool deconstruction of consumer culture that her sources might suggest, focussing instead on universally recognisable elements of the human psyche. Like Red Curtain, Fireworks is something of a tease. It sparks our anticipation but refuses to indulge it, and in leaving us wanting more, it nudges us into an examination of that very desire.
Michael Wilson

Reception: March 4, 6 - 8 p m .

Image:
"Red Curtain" 2004. Archival Digital Print, 40" x 60"

Lyonswier Gallery
511 W. 25 St, 205
212.242.6220

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