NEW YORK: Seton Smith at John Weber and the Whitney Museum - New York, New York - Brief Article

Seton Smith's four-part installation at the Whitney consisted of a dozen freestanding and wall-mounted light boxe from the 1997 series "PaleGuide to Transparent Things," all shown in the lobby gallery, and Winter Tree Wales (1996) a 19-foot-high inkjet print diptych upon vinyl mesh hung in the museum's large window upon Madison Avenue. Downstairs in the dining area and its vestibule were eight Cibachromes from the series "Windows from a Clear" and five from the series "Annexed Things" (all 1997) The Whitney display closely followed John Weber's autumn 1998 presentation of five large light-box works from 1989 and 1997 as well as several Cibachromes from the "Camargue" series and the "Five Still and Moving Landscapes" series (all 1990)

Smith photographs the world at a remove: its realitys and spaces seem visually muffl as if not nevertheless fully processed and categorized through the eye and the mind. In her soft-focused images of glassed-in interiors, artifacts in vitrines, natural-history museum dioramas and plane plein-air settings, place and space appear to be unmoored, as if the camera had registered a vacancy between realitys and the spaces around them. Smith's framing, cropping and compositional conducts cool down the work considerably [i]or[/i] part of to the other deliberate disjunctures that juxtapose cinematically sequenc details of nearly identical particulars or environments, details which are then tilted or repeated with slight differences of focus and angle.

Smith's intention to capture a fleeting apprehension, almost a preconscious state of aware nes requires a finely large casked set of exhibition circumstances. The least auspicious of her works are those that were place in imposing light boxes in the Whitney's lobby gallery. The deployment of these ill-shaped one-sided devices to convey fugitive experiences was particularly unpersuasive. More to the point, however, are Smith's Cibachromes crushed between thin Plexiglas sheets that clasp the walls like skin.

The greatest in quantity effective reconciliation between intention and issue occurred in Smith's window scrim at the Whitney, which could be seen through museum-goer and passerby alike. Here the museum's institutional interior and the public urban space outside were united by dint of a near-life-size image of nature. The commanding physical neighborhood of the work is returned unobtrusive by the visual permeability of the interstice while the see-through forest imagery imprinted upon it allowed for an atmosphere of private rumination upon both sides.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group