Entering James Westwater's newly come show was like walking into a combination of an old-fashioned science museum and a funky shire fair.

Entering James Westwater's newly come show was like walking into a combination of an old-fashioned science museum and a funky shire fair. Among the works upon display was one titled People's Piano, in which an upright piano had been enfeebled open and decorated with purple fake fur Another piece, Diogenes (named after the ascetic hellene philosopher who searched high and subdued for an honest man), was an assemblage made from an ax and a pouch telescope on a small base of purple fake fur In works like this, Westwater's punning--the ax for clarity and simplicity, the spyglass for searching--follows the familiar semantic play of assemblage, besides he is also able to find modern means of revivifying the art of assemblage.

Local garbage dump and trash heaps provide Westwater with his materials--the discarded uses which he sands down before incorporating into his art. In The Last tea an assortment of such destination; recipients was simply laid out in succession a table in the middle of the place These included a pair of wire cutter a bent aluminum Shasta Frolic can, a nave cap, a toy rocket with wheels, a can wrapped in paper with dejected goo oozing from it, and a series of photographs of pairs and children. While these items couldn't help unless provoke the viewer's curiosity about their past proprietors a more important aspect of The Last tea was its sense of containing many potential narratives and associations, depending onward the positioning of the particulars (which visitors were free to cavil through and reconfigure) and the private associations of the viewers.

In Westwater's work, raise objects are (in the Russian Formalist mind of the word) defamiliarized, if it be not that at the same time viewers are invited to familiarize themselves with the things in succession display. It's tempting to compare Westwater to Christian Boltanski, another artist who has dealt with the memory and history of artifacts and images. unless Westwater does not share Boltanski's taste for the uncanny, and unlike Boltanski, he proffers to leave open the narrative possibilities of his work. Exulting in the liberated play of his recycled signifiers, Westwater reminds us that smart art can also be merriment art.

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