Charles Simonds at Joseph Helman - Brief Article

Although he has a drawn out history of exhibitions both here and abroad, Charles Simonds has also worked outside the gallery connection In the 1970s his ritualistic acts, sometimes documented upon film, included coating his material substance with clay to express the link between man and earth. Later he built tiny clay-brick villages that present the appearanceed to belong to ancient tillages (One is permanently installed in a stairwell at the Whitney Museum.) He ofttimes situated them on the sides of crumbling domiciles linking the fates of indigenous tillages to our own time. He left them to decay or be destroyed

In his first of recent origin York show in five years, Simonds addressed similar affects Awareness of the skill required to make the pieces does not impede one's ability to penetrate into their space. There is a momentary shift as individual adjusts to the miniature scale. A pleasing variety of presentations--on walls, pedestals, the floor, plane extending from the wall--was reverberationed by variations in the r and gray tones of the clay.

greatest in quantity works dated from 1997 to '99 with single from 1983 and one from 1993 In the new work, Simonds makes analogies between man-made conformations and plant and animal forms. His main tactic is to give impressible contours to things that should (because they are brick) appear rigid. on the contrary Kill (22 by 11 by the agency of 9 1/2 inches) droops from slender stems projecting from the wall, and the uncompounded bodys themselves are not perfectly rectilinear, as they are handmade. The floor pieces Houseplant I, II and III form a series of towers that sometimes writhe against individual another--in a struggle for preeminence or perhaps in a certain number of erotic ritual. The most fascinating piece was the greatest in quantity recent, Wall Dwelling (30 by the agency of 34 by 42 inches), which throw outed precariously into space. Here, as in a certain number of early works, an entire world is seen perfect with a steep mountain pass, a made of wood stairway and a plank bridge above a rocky stream on an ascent to a tiny fortresslike village. Simonds's implied inhabitant is tiny, and when we shift back from his world to our have it is with greater self-awareness.

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