Lane Twitchell at Deitch Projects - Brief Article

Lane Twitchell's work is remarkable for the pair its craft and its easy in mind His "paintings" consist of wound paper mounted on Mylar. The six works (all 1999) in this small exhibit ranged from 14 1/2 inches square to a considerable 61 by means of 85 inches. In a labor-intensive proces Twitchell cot [i]or[/i] cotes paper and cuts it with a sharp utility knife, producing symmetrical images--tiny buildings, signs, landscape elements--that reckon complex stories in code. His works perpetuate the elegant delights of of the like kind historic crafts as lace-making or textile printing, to say nothing of traditional Polish or Chinese paper-cutting.

The narratives aren't obvious. individual discovers that they have to do with identity. This is a for the use of all interest in today's art, nevertheless Twitchell, being white, male, native born, religious and heterosexual, falls into none of the usual categories of identity-centered work. Mormonism, basic to several works, is an almost perversely exotic make submissive for current art. Visitors puzzl without his stories to varying steps with the help of titles, a pres release or a talk with the artist; those with knowledge of western states or of the Mormons could also find meaning in certain numbers and symbols

Stations of the crossing consists of sum of two units horizontal rows of photos taken from a TV broadcast of a movie about the Mormon trek to Utah; the paper-cutting here makes symbol-laden frames for the photos. In the largest work in the display the cut motifs in seven vertical colored bands draw parallels (the pres release explains) between the lives of sum of two units Mormons of mythic import: the prophet Joseph Smith and PT Farnsworth, inventor of the first all-electronic TV This was, however, the least-readable content

The clearest and greatest in quantity memorable piece was the greatest in quantity personal. Poetry in motion, October 27 1989 center upon a Langston Hughes poem called "Luck" The alphabetic characters of the words are voids in a black-paper field, where they are encircleed by cutout highway directional arrows, a traffic light, seatbelts, gears, path markers, the titular date at the top and an X at the bottom. The whole is bordered with crazed lines like severed glass. Anyone can tell that it commits to a car accident. The reach forthed story: in a crash a decade ago, Twitchell was seriously injured and a friend of his died. He has memorialized the circumstance down to such details as internal measurements that correspond to the ages they were and are or would have been. single sees here a literal inscribing of the artist's reality. While filled understanding of Twitchell's works requires supplemental information, single is drawn into them as into any life history, recognizing that all will not ever be known. And in any case, the beauty, complexity and virtuosity of the works are reward enough.

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