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Fred Cray Lars Kremer Norm Paris Mark Shetabi Devorah Sperber Allen Yates |
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Opens Friday, September 17, 7-9pm  |
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| When the object of your attention does not readily yield to your gaze, that is Squint. You look on it with a little bit of suspicion and your face all squinched up. |
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| Squint is the stubbornly elusive objects and images of the six very different artists: Fred Cray, Lars Kremer, Norm Paris, Mark Shetabi, Devorah Sperber and Allen Yates. Ready your eyeball muscles for a worksome effort. | ||
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| Fred Cray pushes the apparatus of photography to its mechanical limits. His in-camera multiple exposures and out-of-focus blurs turn still images into larger-than-life “motion pitcures.” The only stable element in these stunning cinematic fantasy compositions is the color, which resonates with iconic directness. Across each, a single horizonal strip zips a profusion of images from television gameshows, film and from Cray’s own recent travels in Asia. | ||
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Lars Kremer delivers a simple turquoise Deco dragonfly, luminous and stately in its small lightbox. But look close and the insect bursts into the rhythmic dance of a thousand surreal goddess portraits of renowned choreographer Noemie LaFrance.
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| Along the gallery’s long brick wall undulate Norm Paris’s Elgin-esque sculptural reliefs of a younger, Iron-man Arnold Schwarzenegger (and friends), posing on the stage of Victory. Paris has cast each of the four projecting monuments from the same mold, each time bending and stressing it to mimic the compressions of the body in strong pose. |
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| Mark Shetabi’s dioramic illusion approaches perfect: through a teentsy brass eyehole, one looks into Mary Boone Gallery, circa SOHO. It is between exhibitions, with paintings turned to the wall. The still and muted quietude of the space is eerie and loaded with imminence. |
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| Opposite Devorah Sperber’s 10 x 18-foot 165,000 Shag is a small convex mirror. In it, her gargantuan pipe-cleaner vomitosis of pinks and greens transforms into a perfect drop for drop facsimile of Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Mist. It is a wonder, 165,000 pixels of color mixing inside your brain to reproduce an unexpected classic of stunning elegance. |
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| Viewers stand transfixed before Allen Yates’s simple grid of nine endlessly repeating images. A dog drinks from his bowl. A man slaps himself in the face. Another walks three steps and jumps. Again and again. Over and over. The self-containment of these nothing much happens digital loops is miraculous. For, in each, Yates has found a very short interval of time that is framed beginning and end by an absolutely identical moment. |