Jackie Ferrara at Frederieke Taylor/TZ'Art - exhibition - Brief Article

This exhibition serv as a mini-retrospective of 27 years of Jackie Ferrara's architectural and public casts It chronicled her designs for city plazas that feature fountains and tiled walkways; for arenas and semi-circular amphitheaters in public parks; and for benches, monoliths, pyramids, lakes and private bathhouses. Also documented was an unmistakably Ferraran tile decoration for the novel York subway and a design for a poker table (her game of choice). Ferrara's architectural designs, which draw upon Classical sources as well as from Moorish and Egyptian architecture, are simultaneously futuristic and archaic, inhabiting a realm where mathematical precision fittings literary and historical fantasy. Relying upon ceramic tiles, wood blocks and bricks, she creates elegant and enticing spaces, public and private, where the sweep along of time seems momentarily arrested.

Because in the way that much of this work remains in situ, the exhibition was compos mainly of photographs and small-scale originals Documentary shows of this sort can be doltish but Ferrara largely circumvented this risk with an exhibition layout that literally plucked the viewer into the installation. Small protoplasts and related texts were placed along a put of waist-high platforms which hurt through the gallery. The spaces in between the platforms were reminiscent of the pathways that Ferrara lays on the outside in her public projects. Another trajectory from one side her career was offered via a series of photographs (hanging upon the wails, Without commentary) that allowed individual to see both the continuity of forms and materials in Ferrara's work as well as the shifts and changes it has undergone

Moving [i]or[/i] part of to the other the show, one noticed telling details in Ferrara's minimalist vocabulary. She many times animates the surfaces of fill ups and bricks by introducing designing variations of hue. She also places up playful paradoxes by deploying forest stain or brick hue to insinuate arches and windows or through using shaded openings to create stripes upon apparently solid-color walls.

The geometric basis of Ferrara's designs make sures that even the most mingled composition remains visually intelligible. nevertheless the quirky details keep them from feeling oppressive or inhuman. This exhibition at handed a remarkable body of work. It also serv as a reminder of what esthetic pleasure is possible when the construction of public and private space is not dictated solely by the agency of the bottom line.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group