Jenny Walty

Radek suggested we stop by Ps1 on Saturday since we had a rented van for our installation at the pool but got rained out so had a free aftternoon instead. I hadn't been there in over a year and I always love seeing the summer constructions in the courtyard. They are aesthetic solutions to the problem of having 1000 people hanging out in a gravel and concrete courtyard, it's like party planning on an environmental scale. This year the $70,000 solution is BEATFUSE! by OBRA. It is a beautiful form, protecting most of the space with domed awnings formed by interleaved sheets of plastic with pools snaking along the ground like a zig-zaging spine. The space of the courtyard was calmed and unified under the netlike domes. A fun surprise was to find an icy "make-out roon" around a corner, the call of D.E.M.O. is being heard!
We wandered upstairs to Time Frame, an exquisitely designed exhibition with equivically oriented galleries around a central gallery through which you enter. This central gallery is lined with a series of rich, Ansel Adams textured photographs taken by Hiroshi Sugimoto of blank white movie screens around the world. Each one is more vividly beautiful than the next. Stars skate in arcs behind a drive-in screen or hang motionless on the ceiling of the Avalon Theater on Catalina Island, illuminating the frescoed Venus presiding over the screen.

This gallery was flanked by galleries on all sides, each containing a single wide screen playing a video. There was John Pilson's "Dark Empire" showing the Empire State Building as dusk slowly falls. Another was filmed out the window of airplane from Rio De Janeiro to Sao Paulo by Thiago Rocha Pitta; I came in as the film was taxiing around an airport with the lush mountains and limpid bay of Rio taking center stage. In an axis gallery at the far end, Swamp by Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt wandered through obscuring reeds facing a Paul Pfeiffer video which was the most frenetic piece in the show.

Wandering around in the spareness of these video galleries, I happily abdicated my sense of time, a rare feeling of freedom and investment for me in a video show. Two cast sculptures by Roni Horn sat in opposing galleries on either side of the axis to provide flash points of recognition for the show's symetry, yin and yang.

The next exhibition, Bearable Lightness, curated by Franklin Sirmans, had the same assurance as the larger Time Frame. Seven emerging artists working with the basics of color and form presented an impressive united front. Michele Kong created giant models of "pores" from hot glue and filament which hung from the ceiling like delicate spider-webs. Cory Wagner's "Big White Lie" was a snowflake of white paint dripped onto the dark cement floor. Sungmi Lee contributed an untitled plexi box marked ever so subtly on the inside with incense smoke. I was surprised to see Louis Cameron's paintings, if only because I am not very familiar with his oevre. They prompted a flashback to early OG days when Marlon Sporer was channeling his geometric muse Blinky Palermo, I think he would like Louis' pantone inspired canvases.

I had never heard of John Lurie before but spent some time with his works on paper, each a pithy, sometimes very dark, cartoon-like watercolor. A black turkey-of-death was accompanied by the text, "America is a diseased and corrupt country." A city skyline with a bleeding heart wired in was captioned "New York is for Idiots." "Lion Juggling Fish" makes a perfect arc of gold fish, the lion's arms raised in worship while a cylon eyed building behind him waits for the sacrifice. The paintings are blunt objects, all raw paint and emotion. In "Dog is Blind, who will help?" the dog's watercolor head is left to bleed out into the background, his white eyes open to Lurie's tragic soul.

So, all in all, it's quite worth it to make the trip to LIC this summer, the current shows at PS1 are excellent!