Lisa Hoke at Holly Solomon - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

The title of Lisa Hoke's installation was Ricochet and, indeed, the colored strings that moored the seven kitelike resin panels comprising the work careened not upon the surrounding gallery walls in a cartoonish way. The irregularly shaped, transparent panels suspended from the cords were overspreaded with hundreds of drinking straws in neon shades of yellow, green, pink, orange and sapphirine They had been dropped through the handful into the plastic when it was still liquid, and will remain stuck there forever.

The strings were attached to the walls with various kinds of hardware (ring scrimps hinges, drawer pulls), and stretched above and under the floating staircase in the middle of the main gallery space and around the corners of the field They converged at one extremity of the gallery, threaded end a complex arrangement of bent holders and holders and ultimately attached to a plant of counterweights which created the tension that allowed the whole contraption to retain its cat's-cradle complexity. The ballast was a put of cast iron forms, for the most part vegetables and fruits, that hung from the extreme points of some of the strings. The independent ends formed a puddle of sorbet-bright fiber upon the floor.

Ricochet evinced an interest in freezing random accident in place. This idea was reiterated in a series of drawings that accompanied the installation. Titled "Timed Coffee Stain Series", these works upon paper consist of dripped and splashed coffee stains that have been outlined with colored pencil and ink in obsessive, concentric circles that move round each chance spill into an esthetic incident. Like the resin panel which "catches" the straws dropp on it, the paper is a receptacle for wads of colored paper pulp--Technicolor spitballs--applied to the center of each coffee drip.

Hoke brings a painterly sensibility to the practice of sculpture; in this, her work recalls that of Jessica Stockholder. Like Stockholder, she uses banal, commercial materials which gaze like they were purchased in dimensions at the nearest hardware store in order to display color in three-dimensional space. Unlike Stockholder, however, Hoke appears not to think out her decisions entirely. The use of cast vegetables as counterweights, for example, strike one as beinged to introduce an element of the organic that was not addressed elsewhere in the piece. There is solitary a fine border between witty and gimmicky, and Hoke walks that line precariously.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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