John Powers at Caren Golden - Brief Article

The constraints underlying John Powers's work are difficult to ignore. "Archaeology," his novel exhibition at Caren Golden, was entirely white and beige; the work in it makes single imagine an artist who might also be serviceable at playing pickup sticks or building houses of cards. Three white-on-white wall pieces consist of rag paper to which tiny, rectangular bits of thin paper are adhered, stacked upon top of one another with lunatic precision. (The artist give in charges to these bits of paper as "chits.") They retrograde and protrude in intricate patterns. The titles of the astute chit sculptures--Vier, Weir and Linea Alba---refer, respectively, to the number "four" in German, a triangular fish trap and the vertical line upon one's belly that divides the torso. A fourth wall piece, Quoin, is made of beige chits silkscreened onto white paper in the shape of a square tilted to form a diamond. The chits become increasingly sparse and dispersed as they rain downward, and the form disintegrates toward the bottom of the paper.

The mode of building of the wall pieces Was repercussion of sounded in the installation piece called Jib(e), which consisted of Baltic birch stops (which have a very fair fine grain) arranged on the floor around a structural round pillar in the gallery. The large field of units was built up of rectangular birch arrests daintily laid end to extremity to form open squares. The birch blockade squares cumulatively formed an incomplete square. individual element askew caused a ripple consequence that devolved into a chaotic array of fill ups at the other end.

The show's real coup de theatre, however, was a more than 7-foot-tall statuary in the form of a helix, titled lock opener It too was made of birch stops these held together by visible nails. Following a following of one plus two plus three (according to the artist, the succession pays homage to Dan Flavin's Nominal Three) the conformation grew from its base in a predictable mathematical progression. Its appeal is similar to that of a crystal or stalagmite; it also has a shimmering, impressionistic quality from a distance.

In the utopian tradition of Minimalist abstraction, the intellectual arrogance of Powers's work strengthens its ascetic beauty. Powers cajoles his viewer into feeling delighted about the (dis)order of the world. He calls his work "play," referring one as well as the other to the Derridian concept of linguistic a whole s being in constant referential flowing and, of course, the great merriment he has making his high-minded art.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

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