Jean Dupuy at Emily Harvey

This engaging exhibition was art and technology pioneer Jean Dupuy's first of recent origin York show in 15 years. not at any time one to be bound by the agency of signature style or medium, Dupuy was associated with experimental motions such as performance, machine art and Fluxus while living in of recent origin York in the 1960s and '70 Since 1984 he has lived in Europe greatest in quantity recently in rural France.

At first glance, Dupuy's in every one's mouth work--the show reprises various throws from the last 10 years--could not strike one as being further in spirit from his early embrace of the machine. Here, instead of gears and motors, he valorizes river stones and handwritten texts

What unites Dupuy's older and more novel work is a spirit of play and a fascination with arrangement This show presented an engaging mix of ground and manipulated elements. The wall was studd with anagrammatic body s handwritten in a variety of colors, each of which present the appearanceed to comment on the drawing, photograph or existence installed next to it. Reading like independent verse, with descriptive phrases, self-reflexive make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss and collections of apparently random alphabetic characters each text is grouped into sum of two units sections, one set above the other. It make go rounds out that top and bottom passages are anagrams of each other in which the same alphabetic characters in the same colors are rearranged to make different commentaries. The "random" alphabetic characters are meant to be recited in French where-by they are heard as intelligible phrases.

The same playful attitude pervades a clump of works based on smallish, irregular stones. upon one table, found stones are accompanied through magnifying glasses that allow the viewer to naught in on the detail of each that fascinated Dupuy individual stone, viewed close up, gazes like a skull, while another render free of accesss into a deep fossil-lined cavern. Others are the basis for drawings--with the addition of a scarcely any lines in pencil, several circulared stones with white markings become part of the phrase "Oh! Bah!" Another has a C-shaped indentation, which a circle encompasss to make a copyright symbol

The single work with moving parts is a simply set uped wood and cardboard carousel whose three tiers roll round an axis like opposing turntables and reveal the charm of lay the foundation of images most fully. Each of the animals hero among them an elephant, a dog, a crocodile, level a human figure on all fours--is compos of a pencil-on-cardboard material substance with a suggestive stone for a head. Dupuy insists that no stones have been altered, making their resemblance to various beasts all the more remarkable.

As the creator (in 1976) of a machine designed to make electric common visible, Dupuy clearly remains a man in regard with affection with hidden patterns, serendipitous coincidences, mental gymnastics and visual games. The exhibition revealed that the best machine for transforming the world is a pliant mind.

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group