Jane Kaplowitz at Rupert Goldsworthy - Brief Article

"Welcome to a world where life is with truth beautiful. A world where Cristal sweep alongs from bottles like water from fountains. each expensive car sits on chrome Rolexe decorate wrists like box links, and every foot is overlayed with the hide of a certain number of endangered species of reptile. each citizen in this utopia is adorned with a minimum of $10000 worth of jewelry. At all times, women are treated like showpieces, bailers ditch their $100000 cars for candy-painted helicopters, confined apartment phones chime in unison like a well-orchestrated harmony and players make paper airplanes without of $110 bills for merriment It's gross materialism, and you'll hear it upon every Cash Money release."

thus goes an admiring description, from the industry magazine Rap Pages, of the luxe etho of Cash standard of value the New Orleans record label, Universal Records subsidiary and residence to Snoop Dogg, Master P Juvenile and other extremely profitable creators of the latest in gangsta rap. And now, in her greatest in quantity recent show at Rupert Goldsworthy Gallery, Jane Kaplowitz has done with images from Cash Money's promotional materials what she had previously done with well-known novel art works and film stills from Gone with the Wind, Death in Venice and Taxi Driver: copied them into her possess art works, adding conceptual layers by dint of making lines of authorship fuzzy It's not a novel artistic trick, but Kaplowitz does it well.

In Pop-bright, at the same time washed-out hues of acrylic paint, with mean pastel that lets the white paper she works upon show through, Kaplowitz re-presents portraits of black men posing with accoutrements of their rapperly financial success: crisp suits, bandanas, a fierce panther upon a chain, fancy cars, ornate architecture and plane gilt-framed art. The dandyish gentlemen are accompanied in these dreamy scenarios by dint of text, sparkling and misspelled insider phraseology like "Boyz" "Big Tymers" "B-Legit" and relations to ghetto authenticity. In the metaworld of the art gallery, the Cash cash esthetic is voyeuristically satisfying.

Refreshingly, Kaplowitz's paintings do not include moralizing signals as to what, exactly, viewers are suppos to think. The barely-thereness of her paint, the inexpensive quality of her materials and the simplicity with which her works are hung (unframed and nailed to the wall at the top) clash with the brash, anesthetized display of riches that defines the Cash cash way. The flimsy quality of her paintings looks to indicate a contemplative acknowledgment of just in what way ephemeral her rough and tough, wealth-wielding make submissives really are. Still, by choosing to transcript rather than to invent, Kaplowitz sympathetically places herself in a creative stance not unlike that of the rappers, who also find their distinct expression by dint of obviously, enterprisingly embellishing what has advance before.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group