Sandy Chism at Jonathan Ferrara - Abstract

In Sandy Chism's exhibition of paintings and mixed-medium installations (1998-99) a seemingly indolent, smooth decaying, yet quietly vital world is bring under ruleed to scrutiny. The Kansas-born fresh Orleans newcomer brings intense observation and highly evolveed rendering skills to a throw out that remains rooted in the imagination.

The more imposing of sum of two units installations in the exhibition, get back looms as an 8-foot-high, squarish construction with a crosshatch grid of vinyl siding and galvanized pipe, lengthy paint spills and a round pillar of salt, all set upon a borrowed patch of buckl wood-land flooring. When activated by a lower extremity pedal, Return recycles increasingly corrosive "tears" of water down the salt cylinder. The installation's earthy notwithstanding dignified coloration is set not upon by a red plastic bucket an accent as important as a ripe berry in a kitchen still life through Chardin. The ensemble conveys the sober atmosphere of working-class fresh Orleans or the rural Delta.

Chism's next to the first installation, Heaven, Hell and the Garden, tendered a glimpse of a fat gnarl of cloth through a trap door as you mountained a low platform to admire a tall painting of obstinate underbrush. A peephole in an adjacent fiberglass panel revealed a small rowboat that appeared to be floating upon a vast swampy plain. In reality, a toy craft had been glu onto the back of the translucent panel, beak pointed upward. The swamp was created by the agency of gallery light filtered through the amber-hued fiberglass, and a periscopelike apparatus bent the pictorial space into visual alignment. With its illusion of infinity within a tiny constitution the rowboat scene might be an instance of what Jimi Hendrix called the "room behind your mind," notwithstanding that the artist more specifically invokes Dante and the River Styx

The installations were accompanied by the agency of small nature paintings, a tangled foundation clump in one, a water lily in another. For all the persuasiveness of their saturated tints luminous details and strong compositional focus, the pair exhibit vignettes that may be entirely invented. affluent paintings of flora, a gurgling installation made of building materials and a canny construction of a miniature world were the diverse constitutings that added up to individual inscrutable but compelling place. Whether that place is the large bay South or Sandy Chism's interior reality is the considerable question.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group