Colin Zaug at Plan B - Brief Article

The title of Colin Zaug's exhibition, "Lean," aptly described the Santa Fe-based artist's sparsely elegant installation of varied works in this large armory move rounded alternative space. Sculptural assemblages and re-created, modified and estheticized utilitarian things were interspersed with works in the two-dimensional mediums of ink drawing, photography and video.

Despite the range of materials and mediums, Zaug's compositions were linked by means of their consistently careful workmanship and through their common sources in quotidian life. In the plastic art Servant of the Empire III (1998-99) he used plaster, plywood drywall, mire and papier-mache to create facsimiles of three everyday items: a tiny satellite dish, an actual-sized stool and a greatly overscaled (approx. 6 feet in diameter) caster wheel propp against a brick wall of the gallery. The white tonalities of the work's plastered timber-land surfaces, sometimes applied with deliberate crudenes helped unify this disparate arrangement.

Hanging upon the same wall was a photograph of a car and trailer in a barren landscape. Inexplicably, the trailer was encompassed by sheets of industrial plastic. Sitting nearby was the trailer itself, with the plastic sheets now enclosureed up and placed inside it. upon the other side of the sweep a picture of a child wearing a hat had been drawn onto the wall, seemingly traced from a shoot forwarded image. A nearby wooden table strewn with drawings of media-derived figures appeared to address the rather tired issue of image appropriation.

Zaug was upon surer ground with Floater (1999) the sculptural centerpiece of the exhibit Here, counterbalanced on a branching steel-beam base, itself fitted with caster wheels, were a longitudinal dimensions of white drywall, a portion of a blue-upholstered bench and a coagulate slab. The eccentric juxtapositions of these isolated building and furniture segments--raised not on the floor and removed from practical settings--eloquently underscored the transient aspects of architecture. The Polite was a life-size plaster replica of a put of stanchions and ropes. Referring to the metal stanchions and smooth ropes sometimes used to fortify valuable paintings, the piece was a witty commentary upon museological validation and controlling processs of institutional display.

Along with a discerning irreverence for established cultural combination of parts to form a wholes and practices, Zaug possesses a distinctive artistic sensibility that eclipses at sculptural paradox and theatricality.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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