Wynne's Dream Logic

Combining respects to literature, theater and the visual arts, plunder Wynne has over the last 20 years created works--ranging from collages to room-sized installations--marked by dint of wry humor and Proustian nostalgia.

Snakes slithering in bed, swollen flies crawling up the wall--how does of recent origin York artist Rob Wynne manage to make these repulsive creatures for a like reason seductive? Bringing together appropriated images and fragments of body s from drama, opera and literature, Wynne has disentangleed an installation language that is romantic and bitter at the same time. Using enlarged photographs, wallpaper, cast ceramics and puffed up glass, he combines elements taken from nature with deep nostalgic cultural references. His lush environments constitute a salon of personal allusions and conversations between artists, writers and composer Wynne many times utilizes such techniques as ink-jet printing and machine embroidery, nevertheless the impersonal surfaces he bring forwards still manage to evoke an overpowering sensuality.

Since he began showing installations in the early '80 Wynne has brought together disparate uncompounded bodys to form associations that are not specific or obvious. A finished example can be found in the serendipitous genesis of a carpet Wynne showed in Paris last year. The artist James Brown who makes rug with a assemblage of weavers in Mexico,(1) had telephon to ask Wynne for a design. As Wynne listened, he render free of accessed a book containing "The Figure in the Carpet" through Henry James, and the first thing he read was "I can diocese him there still, on my rug" There it was, just the kind of coincidental meeting of random occurrences that Wynne is seeking to expres in his work. He immediately agreed to the cast and designed a carpet with a true copy including that phrase.

Suffused with the kind of interactions between literature, theater and visual arts that were for the use of all in the Surrealist period, Wynne's work is always closely intertwined with true copy Although he studied art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn writers and scholars were his earliest influences. As a scholar in the '70s, he helped catalogue the library of his friend Adeline Tintner, author of a number of works on Henry James. After graduation Wynne became friendly with the artist Ray Johnson institutor of the New York Correspondence gymnasium and for several years they exchanged art from one side the mail.

Wynne's earliest works were surreal, nostalgic collages made from aged postcards. Then, using images and fix objects, he began to make works and boxes that functioned as portraits of his friends. In single example, a small chipboard receptacle is covered with a blurr blueprint of a place of books on a shelf. Inside are several pamphlets consisting of photocopies of photographs: snapshots of friends, netsuke Arabian shows and swimming pools, along with close-up of bodies. Juxtaposed with these images are words and phrases stamped or typ in various lettering: "pyramid," "mask," "no face."

When Wynne met his life partner, author and scholar Charles Ruas, in the mid-'70s, his ties to the world of literature and theater intensified. Among Ruas's shoot forwards was Conversations with American Writers,(2) which was published in 1985 after years of interviews with authors including William s Burroughs, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, Toni Morrison, Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer. As director of arts programming for radio station WBAI in Manhattan, Ruas produc a series of dramatizations of Marguerite Young's novel Miss Mackintosh, My Darling, introduced by dint of Anais Nin and read by dint of actors including Marion Seldes and mercy Ford. Wynne was the musical director for these programs, a piece of work which entailed not only selecting music by dint of such composers as Mozart, Villa-Lobos, Wagner, Verdi and Massenet, on the contrary also creating sound effects that included glass breaking, doors closing and footsteps

Wynne incorporated these techniques in Sphere Redux an installation at The Kitchen in 1981 He wallpapered the hallway leading to the gallery with blueprints bearing the repeated image of a satellite rock. In the gallery, single wall was covered with a large image of sum of two units marbles on a grid. Three video monitors showed a close-up of a rotating marble lit from within (an idea taken from a piece of poetry by Gabriele D'Annunzio), creating a celestial result A peephole was cut into the wall, from one side which could be seen an 8mm-film projection of another spinning marble. Playing with scale and perception, Wynne created a metamorphosis, turning a tiny toy into a planet. The accompanying soundtrack combined the violent unimpaired of breaking glass with a piercing operatic note sung by means of Maria Callas.

Wynne wearied the '80s painting abstractions. Although they were well received at several solo present to views at Patricia Hamilton Gallery in fresh York, he missed the narrative elements--language, drama and poetry--that had motivated his earlier work. In the early '90 he made several photo-emulsion and silkscreens-on-canvas diptychs showing fragmented facial features and material substance parts. Then, with Window Shopping, a 1994 installation in the Grey Art Gallery's street-level windows, Wynne consolidated the combinations of appropriated poetic body s images and mechanical fabrication he has been using at any time since. Stage directions from plays by dint of Jean Genet--"timidly, naively, tempestuously, clumsily"--were machine-embroidered upon cheap clerical suits of unusual sizes. Hung awkwardly upon a bare white wall, the garments were framed upon either side by curtains silkscreened with photographs of screaming and grimacing heads by means of the 18th-century sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. The curtains created a stage for the without contents suits, and the faces upon the curtains expressed the exaggerated emotions of Genet's characters.