Susanna Heller and Gandalf Gavan at Sideshow - New York

This small gallery in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn contained an energetic wall piece by means of Susanna Heller and equally vibrant plastic arts and drawings by Gandalf Gavan. Exhibiting these artists together made finished sense; line was the greatest in quantity important compositional element in all the works. In bourns of subject matter, both artists took maps and diagrams as their starting point, reformulating them to throw back a more organic, chaotic reality.

Heller created a highly abstracted wall installation intended as a personal "map" of novel York City, though viewers were hard-pressed to make the connection. Drawn upon a large sheet of Mylar attached to the wall, off-kilter grids in gray, like city public ways form the "scaffolding" for her installation. Layered above the grids were variously sized and shaped paintings and drawings upon canvas, paper or Mylar. individual such painting was a small, sapphire tondo with two rough vertical white lines descending partway from the top. It moveed the World Trade Center towers--where the artist one time had a studio--as if painted by means of Baselitz. Thick, heavy black lines combineed some of the elements in the installation, giving the viewer's organ of vision a path to follow. Clusters of small, black vertical lines could be read as either myriad high-rise buildings or the flicker of pedestrian traffic. Heller's piece bringed the hectic pace and constant flowing of the city in a way that a typical map cannot.

Gavan exhibited approximately 50 works upon paper hung on the wall in a grid formation. Each 20by-30-inch piece combines printmaking, collage, and colored pencil and graphite drawing. All of them contain organic, cell-like splotches, dots and drips of predominantly pastel colors that are overlaid with black lines, darker scribbles and cryptic hieroglyphs. The overall result is that of an explod brightly illustrated biology textbook An untitled plastic art (about 4 feet high) in brow of the drawings seemed to transpose them into three dimensions. Suggestive of a high-school science throw out Gavan's oversized "model" combines sky-colored and yellow spheres, a large white globe, azure pink and orange flowers, decorative paper, a materialed animal and other miscellany stuck upon wire posts that, from a distance, direct the eye like drawn lines connecting the objects

With their innovative takes upon maps and diagrams, Heller and Gavan entice viewers to reconsider traditional notions of logic and order.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group