For his modern "Erasure Drawing" installation.

For his modern "Erasure Drawing" installation, Gary Simmons deflected three gallery walls into giant blackboards. He painted the walls a slate color and compos forward each, in white chalk, a single evocative image--a gazebo, a slam-bang cartoon explosion and a roller coaster. He then smudg or partially erased the drawings, resulting in a strange mix of luminous clarity and gradual disappearance. Despite their expansive scale, the hovering forms appeared to be fading from view, making it assume that one approached them within a screen of faltering memory.

As with his earlier, racially charged work, Simmons base these images in 1930s and '40 comic parts His looming, 45-foot-long roller coaster, Ghoster harm up looking both apparitional and magisterial. Gazebo, which appeared to be rotating, was a garden sanctuary gone on the outside of control. The explosion, roar replete with clouds propelled each which way, conflated whimsy and violence. Because it was isolated from a narrative line, it focused attention upon violence as a pervasive, abstract force.

These works adviseed childhood drawings made on the wall in one's have a title to bedroom (always a forbidden activity) or clandestinely scrawled forward the blackboard after class. now with their resonant iconography and dramatic carriage they also recalled religious frescoe and murals. Simmons is a savvy artist, shuttling between "high" and "low" construction and deconstruction. however there remains something emotionally engaging--perhaps smooth devotional--at work here.

Downstairs there was a series of modestly scaled chalk drawings forward paper focusing on details of the wall drawings: a leash of clouds from the explosion, the weathervane in succession top of the gazebo, a section of the rollercoaster. They're gorgeous works in their have a title to right, and they continue what the larger pieces in like manner successfully accomplish: propelling snippets of past popular-culture imagery into a of recent origin genre, investing them with unexpect meaning and psychological pressure

...

Home