Four Artists at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center - Joel Simpson

Four Artists at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center
Joel Simpson

Having

just closed an immense, exhilarating, exhausting show of "surrealist,
fantastic and visionary art," that inspired almost as much denunciation as
delight (and that included costume ball, an over-the-top "fashion
show," and a film series), the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center is
giving itself a well-deserved breather. Its current show,
"Mercurial," features four artists who would fit well into any
adventurous contemporary gallery.

Tamiko Kawata, Pueblo

Rie
Hachiyanagi has created an installation entitled "Tears" that fills a
side room on the second floor. Drawing on the license a non-native speaker has
with the language (and that Nabokov celebrated), she puns on the two meanings
of the homograph—salty eye excretions (Latin: lacrimae) and sheet rips (Latin:
lacerati)—that native speakers learn early on to erect mental barriers against
to avoid obvious confusions. Her one-time only creation consists of a space
filled with slivers of dollar bills hanging from draped cloth seven to eight
feet above the floor. The slivers reach to within two to three feet of the
floor, so one walks through them, parting them as one would a continuous but
exquisitely rarified bead curtain. At first view you’d almost think she was
representing a form of rain (for which lacrimae constitute a rather commonplace
metaphor), with the minute twisting chiaroscuro of the material. However, when
you realize what the material actually is, you experience a lacerating shock.
For you’re moving through those friends in your wallet or purse that have been
transformed with excruciatingly delicate irony in a deliberate gesture of
wastage, into a solid environment, a virtual weather condition, like an
economic invasion—or a bombing raid.

In
the main second floor gallery, curator Yuko Nii has installed three artists working
in metal. Daniel Rothbart uses welded aluminum to create a series of
provocative biomorphic forms that includes stag horn coral-like branchings,
webs, immense worm-like segmentations, a coil and line of hooks, and a curious
hanging device reminiscent of a miniature child’s swing, but with variously
shaped metal bulbs hanging from it. He calls this collection his "urban
botany," expressing organic themes through inanimate building materials.
There’s a very refined humor in Rothbart’s contrast between material and theme,
and we can look forward to his use of these materials in ever more extravagant
and intricate ways. His hanging device goes the farthest in this direction.

Tamiko
Kawata constructs virtual cosmologies on the floor. You approach a 15-foot
diameter swirling pattern spreading out at you feet, sensing something galactic
in the whirl and glisten. It’s all made of safety pins, googles of them. (What
better use for them in this age of paper diapers?) Grandiose works fabricated
by obsessively repeating the same constructive act are not uncommon these days.
Kawata, however, has given her capacity for this kind of work a striking
metaphysical resonance: the banality of her materials contrasts strongly with
the themes of his overall forms, and one is provoked to reflect that the
universe may be constructed along similar lines.

Finally,
Gloria Kisch has installed a series she calls "Bells," chains of
stainless steel, well, bells, vaguely oriental, Tyrolian cow, and otherwise,
shish-kebabbed like immense wind-chimes, hanging on chains from the ceiling,
and interlarded with other symmetrical metal shapes, pointy and double-conical.
They have an appealing momentousness, asserting their sensuous curves and
metallic gleams with a boldness that offers a satisfying balance to the minute
obsessiveness of Kawata and Hachiyanagi and the aspiring branchings of
Rothbart.

Four Artists at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center – Joel Simpson