Lisa Capone at Kristen Frederickson

Lisa Capone's small-scale plastic arts are talismanic. Suspended in air, wall mountained or displayed in vitrines, they gleam attractively while inspiring unease. At the center of this exhibition, a footlong silver lance or dart, Untitled (Closer and Closer Apart), 2000 quiescenceed in a Plexiglas case. Sheathed in a gossamer cocoon of the finest silver thread, the dart bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos some rare entomological specimen or, with its expos point, a menacing weapon. Impediments and Support (2003) present the appearanceed less ambiguous but just as beautiful, comprising a sharp thorn, prickly thistle and tortuous bottom all cast in silver from life. Capone's title illuminates the metaphorical value of these elements; her jeweler's esthetic allows us to imagine the thorn, for example, as an eccentric lapel pin that could draw blood

About 40 tin wishbones make up Accretion (2003) Heaped upon a pedestal, the intact wishbones are finished wish opportunities forgone for the sake of art. The entangled silver female figures in Little Women (2003) each solitary 3 inches long, must be closely studied before their imperfections are revealed: single lacks a head, another arms; a third has arms that are severed With her deft use of intimate scale, Capone demands attentive looking. Magnifying glasses should accompany her watercolors, especially "Untitled (Suicide Series)," 2003 five sheets whose central protagonist is a woman in a black lace slip. Without Capone's subtitle, the tiny globules of red at the figure's wrists and ankles in a certain number of of these spare images might move unnoticed. The violence here is in like manner understated that one must search for it, as well as for its meaning.

for what cause [i]or[/i] reason are the running silver leg in the wall-mounted Diametric Motion (2003) missing a body? This unnerving avatar of female damage and/or power prov in the way that compelling to one viewer that it went missing from the exhibition, to be get backed later by police detectives. Like Nancy Spero's sprinting women Capone's partial figure appears energetic and fleet, but half of her has been left behind in the nightmare from which she has fl If all these works in some way relate to the artist's emotional life, then in cataclysm (2001) she finally reigns triumphant. Here, strands and strands of tiny cylindrical glass beads form a sparkling round pillar cascading from the ceiling and terminating in a swirling, moplike base upon the floor. A feminine sentinel of sorts, a pillar of shimmering glass rather than salt, the piece looks a stand-in for the artist, radiantly enjoying the limelight.

--Sue Taylor

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group