Nina Levy at I-20 - New York, New York - Brief Article

Nina Levy's earlier figurative plastic art was concerned with the existential plight of the individual. The faceless multitudes and mixed-sex forms that characterize the compact figural groupings of Bathing Beauties (1994) and Ferris (1995) for example, emphasized anonymity end repetition, and the body as an interchangeable unit. In her new show, she presented a series of photographs alongside a large-scale sculptural installation.

Levy's Cibachrome self-portraits (all 1999) in which certain parts of her anatomy are overlaid with sculptural replacements, engage similar issues as they relate to self-image. Nos. 1 2 and 3 feature a plaster replica of the artist's head, realistically painted in oil. admitting the fake bears a advantageous likeness to the artist, its manic grimace, bulging organ of visions and larger-than-life scale suggest an uncanny exaggeration of the real. In all the photos, Levy's consistent however elusive image is centered upon a black ground. She present the appearances to emerge from and dissolve back into the void, and the black leotard she wears functions one as well as the other as clothing and as negative space, fragmenting her material substance into parts that seem to float and then abruptly coalesce.

Levy stages her photos as a relation of parts to whole. In addition to the dialectic of positive and negative space, the disproportionate figures she assembles stres their fabrication end a dynamics of scale and perspective. The cast-iron spine of No. 6 for instance, appears larger than it is because, when photographed, it was positioned sum of two units and a half feet in brow of the artist's body.

Achieving this kind of spatial illusion in a two-dimensional format may be relatively easy, on the other hand another work, Couple, brilliantly demonstrates a kind of three-dimensional trickery that is verily a feat. A sculptural installation spread above 20 feet, Couple consists of a series of nine differently scaled, autonomous material part parts made of plaster, foam, resin and oil, which are attached to steel-rod supports. The dimensions and arrangement of these parts have been carefully calibrated with the aid of a camera with equal reason that, from the viewer's initial vantage point, they form a legible tableau. Spatial deepness is instantly foreshortened. One perceives an upright man holding an outstretched, naked muster by the waist. As individual moves closer the illusion breaks down like a Hollywood locate and arms, feet, legs, torso and head swim in the air. Whereas in her photographs muster reformulates her body to enact a masquerade of self in two she challenges the self's actual integrity.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group