Jenny Walty

I wandered up to Pierogi 2000 on my way to find the perfect toolbox a Sunday ago. It turned out to be the most delightful show and included several artists I discovered and plan to follow. For a half hour or so I sweated in the subtly manic detail that unified the big summer show, called Reconfigure. The works that ate up the minutes included 2 sculptures and more than a few watercolors, collages, and monologues.

The front gallery is anchored by “To Dust,” the center of attention hanging above its summer-white mini-pedestal. Jonathan Schipper, the artist, suspended a machine from the ceiling whose purpose was not clear on first glance. After watching it for a minute or so, the subtle movement produced by the motors, spokes, and bicycle chain could be seen slowly lifting and lowering two plaster busts hanging upside down. As the faces and necks of the casts rubbed up and down against the other the plaster ground away, slightly defacing the 18th century perfection to sift a small pile of white powder onto the white mini-pedestal. The whole allegory of the friction of history seems to be a machine to create a mini-po-mo sculpture.

In the corner diagonal from “To Dust,” stood a miniature water tower, perfect except for the ooze pouring through the trestles and pooling on the pedestal. The “water” is made of blue glass but has mysterious orange stripes, reminiscent of NY’s recent drinking water contamination. The sculpture is called “Once were Kings,” for some unknown reason.

Taking a circuit of the front gallery, chock full of graphic paintings, I was arrested by a series of three collages by Tony Fitzpatrick, incredibly detailed using bits from stamps and small images from old books or magazines. They are titled, from left to right, “Girl Drug,” “Chicago Night Sky,” and “Perfect Waitress.” Each collage contains a dense pictorial field and a poetic narrative, completing the world of the work with representations of the vast and impersonal world as well as the specific perspective from which a story can be assembled.

The back gallery had more great work, and I allowed myself some moments to wallow in David Kramer’s self-defeating narratives, typed onto drawings with titles like, “Sometimes I wish that my god-given talent had been in a more profitable line of work.” I am of the opinion that David’s work is equally endearing and obnoxious. His monologues are tragic-comic and if you’ve ever seen him perform them live you will never again be able to read the written version and not laugh aloud while imagining him reading. He makes really beautiful (and saucy) installations and his videos are brilliant, but he knows his market, he seems to be selling a lot of drawings. Can’t blame the man, gotta make a living.

So I walk out of Pierogi equally humbled and inspired, with the burning question of where I see my own sculpture going on my mind and no easy answers.