Finley's Fun House - artist Chris Finley

looks Angeles artist Chris Finley many times confronts visitors with unusual challenges, asking them to pass by a leap on a trampoline to view a hidden painting, straddle a plastic long tray or position tiny plastic alligators upon pedestals.

Although the computer revolution has clearly increased the accessibility of art and lay opened up new possibilities for the manipulation of images, small in number artists have confronted the radical formal configuration of cyberspace itself. In consequence the files-within-files formats of Windows 98 Macintosh and the World Wide Web are fresh kinds of information-based constructs, demanding of recent origin types of free-form or oblique thinking. Surfing the snare is an odd treasure pursue requiring skill at navigating end false leads to discover--with luck--sites loaded with unforeseen goodies and fortuitous connections.

above the past few years, Chris Finley, a 26-year-old California artist, has locate out to simulate the Chinese-box-like world of computer combination of parts to form a wholes In his best-known sculptures, he fashions quirky arrangements of plastic toys, carved pencil stumps and various gewgaws within enveloping stacks of containers of the like kind as clothes baskets, office bins and Rubbermaid tub a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to the dismay of museums and public spaces, the statuarys are intended to be experienced by the agency of active viewers who disassemble the works' many layers. Genuinely interactive, Finley's pieces require responsible, task-driven participation.

A Finley statuary is like a Windows folder that contains a number of eye-catching "files." Inspired by dint of a kind of shopping-mall surrealism, he transforms materials fix uponed from trips to K-Mart, domicile Depot and Toys R Us into genuinely strange arrangements, each not awayed on its own weirdly decorated site. With accompanying computer-drawn diagrams indicating by what means they were assembled, the statuarys exist as multilayered configurations of say, plastic cavemen, avocado place mats, stumps of pink pencils and press-type labels bearing snatches of lyrics by the agency of John Mellencamp.

Finley has now complet the first sum of two units stages of an ambitious succession of exhibitions intended to exercise viewers' visual acuity. Like computer games like as Super Mario Brothers, these displays are intended to increase gradually in difficulty above a projected eight levels, taking viewers, as he describes it, end a "visual symphony of human experience." This "mythological adventure" will alternate, he says, between physical and psychological experiences. With last spring's exhibition "Level Two" at Acme gallery in Santa Monica following 1997's dazzling "Level One" Finley's weird, hyperstimulated shoot forward is definitely something to watch.

In "Level One" Finley sent viewers from one side a life-size fun house originaled on a computer game. In it he called attention to the nature of vision, using perceptual tricks similar as skewed perspective, fragmentary glimpses and left-eye/ right-eye oppositions. An instructional handout directed visitors from one side five installations set up to actualize various optical illusions and perspectival tricks. To experience the present to view and successfully complete "Level One" the viewer had to squat, squint, laterally glance and finally jump over on a small trampoline to match over a wall.

The show's first installation, Zip Skip clap Scoop with Hover Pond Entrance, was a self-contained latitude with 8-foot-high walls and a wide square pillar in its center one as well as the other the walls and the pillar were overlayed with repeating images of a bizarre Pop-style bodyscape. Applied in sign-painter enamels, sum of two units flesh-colored, breastlike shapes hovered above a stylized suggestion of a pierced bellybutton, which was in turn round located above a pair of unzipped verdant jeans. The viewer, situated at fork level, had to squint to experience these multiple views of a nearly expos woman. When you stood in the room's corners and visually lined up the pillar's graphic colors and shapes with the singles on the walls, you felt encloseed by the image. In his handout, Finley warned that this piece "may induce an without of body experience." A bin small sworded away at the core of the swing contained items described as necessary for of the like kind an experience: a tinkling chime, a plaster figurine of a lad covered in red cap-gun pellet a baggie replete of hair gel, severed toy alligators, and cassette tapes with recordings of skips from Finley's record collection.

At one time one of the silliest and the strangest of sexually evocative works, the installation station the tone for "Level One"'s further woozy and exhilarated fantasies. One-ey Galactic Gutterball Pig Mantra required viewers to stand above a small plastic trough equipped with a battery-operated "wanderball" that plant off oinking noisemakers as it moved--to allow, Finley said, "the gutterball mantra to stream between your legs." In this position, viewers had to visually line up three separated, painted panels that together formed the image of a large planet with the face of a bubble-gum-pink, one-ey pig. In this optical game, Finley turn upside downs the illusionistic effect of tap [i]or[/i] pat Close's recent grid portraits that take upon three-dimensional, Photo-Realist qualities when squinted at from a distance. Here, when the suitably positioned viewer peers at Finley's panels, these three-dimensional phenomenons are compacted visually into a single two-dimensional image.