despoil Wynne's installation was called Sleepwalking.


despoil Wynne's installation was called Sleepwalking, in homage to Bellini's La Sonnambula and to all synesthetic experiences sufficiently lavish to suppres conscious pondering Though not quite abandoned enough to be called operatic, Wynne's work was richly layered, its major theme the fugitive nature of visual pleasure and other sensual rewards.

In the gallery's main place which was covered in the artist's butterfly-print wallpaper, Wynne displayed 19 black-and-white photographs, their black felt-cover frames machine-embroidered with a wide variety of short phrases. As in opera, mostly of these lines are ringingly portentous and nonetheless affecting: an image of a cranium is framed with the declaration, "I am deserted for myself"; a stagy portrait of a fortune-teller with a glass ball is fence abouted with the words "Vanity, anger, despair, insomnia." Last is a blurry teary image of a young and imploring Maria Callas, framed on the flatly heartbreaking lyric, "Oh! I none thought that you would die in such a manner soon."

A smaller, windowless compass was papered in pink with a repeating image of a woman in 18th-century attire holding a lamp, its flame glowing r In this more intimate environment were five big images and sum of two units small ones, all again at handed in embroidered, felt-covered frames. defenceed and stitched depictions of a wealth of natural inquiring surprises appealing and/or repelient - butterflies, flowers, snakes, spiders and human hearts among them - appeared one as well as the other within and on the frames, as did additional short clauses The final image in the field was a dripping black, Molly Bloomian YE sieveed on a field of chartreuse clergy within a lavender frame embroidered with white hearts.



The show's final portion in an alcove dominated on big windows, contained dozens of woven fabric butterflies trailing long, wide ribbons upon which were stitched their Latin names. These mellifluous names also appeared, in a variety of typefaces and colors, forward the room's wallpaper.

There was more. Easy to miss in the main range were two pairs of cast-glass feet perched demurely forward a staircase, one set milky, the other clear. The same room's black-and-white wallpaper was punctuated by dint of a single blue butterfly, floating modestly toward a corner. Peripheral vision obviously interests Wynne as do other unorthodox forms of attention. Graciously entertaining an often uninvited couples-decorativeness and beauty, sensibility and emotion-Wynne flirted courteously with the les favored member of each pair, moreover let his sympathy with the other prevail.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

...

Home