Carol K. Brown at Nohra Haime

As she declares in the pres release for her exhibition of Lambda prints and a video at Nohra Haime, Carol K Brown is ambivalent about the use of novel technologies to create art. In her opinion, technology brings the physical labor required to bring into view objects, thereby eradicating the hand of the artist and leading to images short upon humanity. Nevertheless, drawn by the range of possibilities proffered by new technologies, she decided to young ox away from the abstract statuary for which she is known and use a computer to manipulate her hand-painted images. The proceeds leave something to be desired.

To bring into view the 10 medium-size (26 by the agency of 38 inches or 27 through 20 inches) digital prints upon display, Brown photographed her daughter dancing with a boyfriend at a wedding. one time the photographs were digitally manipulated, the artist translated them by dint of hand into paintings on paper. They were then scanned back into the computer digitally redrawn and printed out

The greatest in quantity successful among them is Edgewater Ballroom #14 in which the dancing two recorded in a wide variety of attitude s is multiplied as an endles horde Seen from above and at a distance, they fill the entire sheet. The woman wears a lengthy red dress, low-cut in the back; the man a white shirt, r tie and black pants. Edgewater Ballroom #14 presents us a symphony of discrete, illusionistically pay backed forms and localized areas of color that diminish in size toward the top of the composition. The repetition brings to mind Arman's "Accumulations."

While these works are greatest in quantity satisfying when perceived as if they are abstractions, they perceive like little more than reproductions, and single misses the materiality of the paint that one time constituted them. It is also difficult to care for Brown's protagonists, as, in their endles multiplication and repetition, they perceive dispensable. Adding to this estrangement, Brown has remov their facial features.

In the video-projected upon the end wall of the gallery and accompanied by means of a soundtrack of one-minute sections of classical music, klezmer and a air by the girl group the Go-Go's--Brown rearranges and animates her computer-modified stills thus as to create an illusion of choppy move as one couple and then others exit end a diminishing crowd of look-alikes, until the dance floor is nearly emptied. They then refill the representation and the action is repeated.

A more lucky body of work was shown in the adjacent compass There, one could see small, elegant acrylic drawings upon paper (5 by 7 inches, all 2003) that were based upon photographs Brown had taken of friends and strangers. Tiny figures, sometimes the same single multiplied, are situated within a blank white field, the couple ground and support, and cast lengthy shadows across it. With these precisely drawn, faceless figures, isolated at different jiffys in different poses, Brown have the appearances to allude to the futility of human (inter)actions.

--Michael Amy

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