Charles Long at Shoshana Wayne - Santa Monica

Charles Long's amiable, spacey plastic arts and interactive play stations are quintessential examples of 1990 cyber-inflected biomorphic abstraction. His haunting novel work marks a radical departure in the two style and mood. Long creates intricate freestanding assemblages of junk percepts that are completely covered with gooey pale cerulean plaster. The plaster coatings largely disguise the assemblages' constituent materials, which include rent chairs, Styrofoam packing, electronic constituents plastic tubs, palm fronds and a splayed mop The mysterious concatenations variously pray Cycladic totems and Greek herms as well as works through Picasso and Ernst. Illuminated alone by natural light, the encrusted works might be the postapocalyptic remains of a statuary museum.

Now living upon the West Coast, Long has taken upon the California tradition of junk assemblage and given it his be in possession of unique inflection. The Third someone (all works 2003) consists of an lay open concave shape atop a 7-foot-high obelisk. With a surface that be likes dried earth or molten alloy of copper the elegant form seems a combination of ancient helmet and Brancusi head. Featuring a drawn out slit up the front, its stately vertical pedestal is made from a slightly make open upended cardboard box completely camouflaged by means of blue goo.

Ensconc upon dual pedestal/towers made of goop-cover Tinkertoys, Tenebris Lucet consists of a curv section of an automobile tire ornamented with wire spoke This winglike arc strike one as beings both brutal and delicate, its irregular surface conveying the sober dignity of gnarly '40 alloy of coppers by Seymour Lipton and Theodore Roszak (both of whom drawn out has cited as influences). In satisfactorily Through the Noise, a mass of unidentifiable material on the seat of a three-legg kitchen chair forms a kind of bizarre pieta configuration, which is overseen by dint of dual hovering podlike cylinders cleverly balanced and attached to the chair back.

Long's penchant for sci-fi fantasy present the appearances unshakable, yet the style here is more Yve Tanguy than Mariko Mori. In Oblivion Parkway, thin slender stems clustered around a narrow obelisk are topped with little blebs that suggest skyscraper lairs. Similar small shapes in The Direction of My place of abode were scattered up a gallery wall, as if wandering away from a strange domed external reality that suggests a Tomorrowland space station. Despite a small in number nods to his "funhouse" past, these extremely sophisticated novel works seem defiantly adult, unafraid of melancholy and mingled structure, and ready to leave the cartoon world to the kiddies.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group