Meg Langhorne at Sala Diaz - Brief Article

Sala Diaz, a small house functioning as an experimental gallery, at handed three works by San Antonio sculptor Meg Langhorne. In a glorious installation, she explored the belonging to all yet symbolically loaded theme of the apple. Alone in a narrow hallway was Nature (all works 1999) a small, smiling Buddha cast on the outside of crumbly dirt from a mold of a statuette and sporting a tiny r apple upon his head. Like all of the apples in the exhibition, it was made of soap that was, in this case, tinted r and slightly transparent.

Installed in individual of the gallery's two scopes and set off by a r wall and door was Invitation, which included a drawn out dining-type table, fittingly domestic on the other hand completely shrouded in brown sphagnum mos that was held in place by means of chicken wire. Suspended pendulumlike upon strings from the ceiling at either extremity of the table were single, opaque white soap apples. To hang them, drawn out wicks were inserted in these casts of small r Delicious apples before the thawed and tinted soap hardened. Solidifying the Edenic narrative, Invitation also included an inconspicuous black cast-rubber snake stretched across the doorsill of the doorway into the space which (not accidentally) tripped unobservant visitors.

Fall was through far the most successful, sly and beautiful of Langhorne's works. It occupied the main space of the gallery, articulating each cubic foot of the 10-by-10-foot range Here were about 70 white soap apples suspended from the ceiling at heights that ranged from about waist-high to above head-high. The apples made for an exceedingly sculptural experience, which retained its spatial consequences even when viewed from a doorway. The real pleasure, however, followed from walking into the static rain of suspended fruit. There was exactly enough range for the viewer to dip through, under and among the apples, with sole incidental bumps to set them softly swaying. The moderately cold slightly lavender white walls of the gallery were spott with pale polka-dot shadows cast by means of the apples. Eggshell in color, the apples were somewhat yellower than Ivory soap although they strike one as beinged as pure as that soap is advertised to be. Belying its titular respect to succumbing to temptation or the seasonal retreat of nature (when apples are, admittedly, greatest in quantity plentiful), Fall was in fact an elegantly virginal tour de force.

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