Liliana Porter's works play with reality in 2-D and 3-D
It's so easy to relate to Liliana's Porter's assemblages of paintings or photographs with tiny toys and porcelain figurines, you might lose sight of how sophisticated they are. In her show at Barbara Krakow Gallery, Porter simply but ingeniously marries the two-dimensional reality of the painting or photo with that of the three-dimensional toys. Characters encounter one another across this divide as if peering through Alice's storied looking glass.
In "To Do That," an inch-tall metal man appears to make his way across a sheet of paper, tearing it up with a pickax. The gouged paper speaks to the man's hard labor; its size, relative to him, predicts more work ahead. "To Do That," like many of Porter's pieces, tells an existential tale. In "To See Blue III," several little figures appear to have been caught in a downpour of blue paint, which oozes out from one corner of a largely white canvas.
Toy soldiers point rifles; others fall into the blue glop. Ladders and furniture appear to float along, and a bucket spills wee pearls, which scatter prettily down into the white area below. At the edge between blue and white, one man shovels chunks of blue into another bucket; a second man holds a book - I imagine it's a Bible, and he's looking for solace or salvation. "To See Blue III" might depict a deluge, but it also alludes to the painterly, emotive mark making of Abstract Expressionism.
Sometimes Porter's work explicitly dives into the perils of relationship. In "Dialogue with Sitting Man," another small figure perches on a shelf, nose to nose with a black-and-white painting of a wide-eyed peacock, many times the man's size. Yet the man appears laconic, the bird alert and possibly frightened.
It's easy to read status and power into the postures and expressions of any duo, this one included. Porter's taut scenarios tantalize the viewer to identify with their protagonists, and that infuses often comic scenes with tragedy.
Also at Barbara Krakow, conceptual artist Allan McCollum offers a fraction of "The Shapes Project." Using a computer, he has generated 31 billion unique shapes. The number intentionally outstrips a United Nations-predicted peak world population around 2050. McCollum presents the forms as black-on-white prints, cameo-like silhouettes that fill one wall, and as wooden sculptures, squatting on pedestals like little critters; there's also one glossy black wall sculpture. The viewer responds to the large number of images on the wall, or to forms individually. It's a dire topic, but McCollum approaches it playfully, giving us a way in.
Armchair war
William Flynn has made a practice of meditating on the war in Iraq by drawing his mother's wing-backed armchair. If that seems an odd metaphor, consider that most of us watch the war from our living rooms. In Flynn's passionate exhibit at Victoria Munroe Fine Art, the drawings sometimes sport the muscular line and attitude of a political cartoon; often they break apart into abstraction, echoing the chaos in Picasso's "Guernica."
In the first one, "Armed Chair, October 20, 2004," the low-slung chair barely contains an ominous, smudged darkness, like an explosion's smoke cloud. In another, dated Aug. 8, 2007, the chair breaks apart; arms jut, nails protrude. Flynn fills the image with wild motion and draws a charcoal backdrop that has the gray stripes of newsprint. For Nov. 25, 2005, the chair shudders around a still television, which holds the image of a hooded figure.
From prisoners at Abu Ghraib to the media's conveyance of the war's stories, Flynn's work is packed with content, but the real power here is in his technique, and his ability in a range of gestures and compositions to capture the helplessness and angst of war. 