Margaret Welsh at P.P.O.W - Brief Article

Like a fate of thirty-something artists, Margaret Welsh mines her suburban '70 childhood for all its chuckle-and-wink worth, and present the appearances endlessly enthralled with its ironic potential. Her latest installation, "Postmortem," comprises a series of Cibachrome photographs, a video and a mixed-medium tableau, and examines the kind of adolescent fantasy generated by the agency of rock music and Hollywood filmmaking. As with Welsh's previous installation "Pure Moods" (1997) which focused upon the commodification of New Age spirituality, "Postmortem" attempts to make bare cultural banality. But while "Pure Moods" advanced its critical premise from one side an absurd discordance of ultimate parts the ad hoc strategy behind "Postmortem" be subservient tos only to undermine its message.

The series of three Cibachromes is the greatest in quantity conceptually disjunctive element. Two depict prosthetic hands and arms, unattached and floating upon monochromatic grounds, one white, individual purple. In their deadpan humor and formality of presentation, they bring to mind the work of Bruce Nauman and Cindy Sherman. The third photo, The Haunted (1998) features a fake mustache that flutters over a psychedelic-patterned ground of refracted colored lights. The blurr circles of r gold-colored and blue echo the glare of stage lights in the neighboring tableau, on the other hand the photo bears no other apparent relationship to it.

The tableau consists of a black backdrop with r smooth curtains and Gothic-arched door, a single bed upon a slanting platform and a track of stage lights. In a large-scale photograph upon the opposite wall, all this becomes the low-budget "set" for a silly, occultish view with a group of black-clad, tattooed teenagers who direct the eye morosely upon a spot-lit friend affecting rigor mortis as he lies naked upon the bed.

The video composing titled Millennium, presents a melange of footage from heroic epics and B-horror films, combined with TV clips and parts of a fictitious music video. Deftly edited, the pageants of glorified violence imbue the otherwise simplistic installation with thematic resonance. Too bad the video is rapiered away in a corner.

Welsh may be loosely structuring her work to allow viewers to make their have associations. However, given the faddish quality of her chosen imagery, quite the opposite is required--especially if she wishes us to think twice about her meaning.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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