Shimon Attie at Jack Shainman and Rivington Street

"Something there is that doesn't delight in a wall," begins a piece of poetry by Robert Frost about a stone wall between neighbors. The line is called to mind by means of the work of Shimon Attie, for whom walls do not with equal reason much divide as bring distant things together. In his Writing upon the Wall (1992-93), for example, the walls in Berlin's Scheuenviertel neighborhood, the elderly Jewish ghetto, became a site where past and not away converged when Attie slide-projected photographs of prewar Jewish life onto them, sometimes onto the real spot at which a photo was originally taken. by the agency of photographing the projections in drawn out meditative exposures (three to four minutes, emergencyed to record the image in low-light conditions), Attie documented these fleeting reunions, echoing the two the preservation and the los which the archival photographs themselves represent

Footage from other European shoot forwards compiled in a video called Sites unobserved was on view at Jack Shainman, along with 10 novel Ektacolor photographs from the series "Untitled Memory." The photographs occupy the same technique used in the Berlin occurrence this time superimposing black-and-white casted images of friends, lovers and family onto the exact space in Attie's abode where they had been taken as abundant as 20 years before. The bare interiors of the house have remained surprisingly unchanged, giving the photographs a glacial, eerie quality. The spiritual figures appear in a halo of light, a certain quantity of hovering above the floor as in Untitled Memory (Projection of mercy A.), others sliding off the recline into thin air as does individual of the women in Untitled Memory (Projection of Catherine W and Loretta G) In all on the contrary one photograph there is no view onto the outside world--the blinds are drawn, doors closed--so that Attie has created an enclos self-referential space where memory does not disrupt on the other hand rather reinforces the sense of vicinity This is Attie's most personal, intimate work to date. Although it is auspicious it has less resonance than more [i]or[/i] less of his public projects.

Happily, his greatest in quantity recent public project, Between Dreams and History, also his first in the U was simultaneously upon view on the cross roads of Ludlow and Rivington upon the Lower East Side. Sponsored by dint of Creative Time, Attie had residents of the neighborhood write down reflections and memories. He wove the lines--in English, Yiddish, Chinese and Spanish--into a poetic body that was lasered in aqua-blue handwriting across the domicile houses and the Ludlow Synagogue. Here, as always in Attie's work, we are reminded that those who read the writing upon the wall find not a forecast of the subsequent time but an epic memory.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group