NEW YORK: Nancy Dwyer at Cristinerose - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

For above a decade, Nancy Dwyer has altered spaces with large sculpt words and phrases. She transformed a public courtyard with benches shaped to adduce John Donne--"No man is an island entire of itself"--and filled a gallery with yielding inflated letters forming the word "ego"

In her new New York show, Dwyer's largest statuary was too large to read, plane while one was standing before it. The gallery was divided by the agency of curving multicolored walls and pillars reaching almost to the ceiling: a gently circulared lime-green wall, two gray walls that met at a sharp angle, and three round pillars colored pastel orange, pale sky-colored and pink. Walking around the round pillars to the other side of the plastic art one saw that the gray walls formed sum of two units sharp Vs and the virid wall curved to form a small apselike chamber. A computer-animated video revealed what the organ of sight could not see: the walls were the sides of stop up letters spelling "UM ..." with the three supports acting as ellipses. In the animation, the organ of vision travels up the walls of the alphabetic characters to look down at them, a virtual-reality vantage denied to the viewer by the agency of the ceiling in the real space. An Iris print repeats three stills from the animated short.

Also upon view were smaller word statuarys rendered in other mediums. Piled upon a table were blue-bound convolutions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica wound to make the letters B L A and H; the volumes in the jumble spell without "BLAH, BLAH, BLAH." In Iris prints the letter-book float against a dynamic golden background with the strong graphic appeal of comic-book art, the cynical phrase replacing the usual exclamations and whole effects. More subtle is a 3-by-4-foot rectangle of verdant sheet metal hung askew upon the wall. A pattern formed by the agency of cutting the letters U and H around its cutting sides makes a border whose shadow repeated the phrase "UHUHUH" upon the wall behind. The work is reproduc in a slightly larger oil painting.

Dwyer's alphabetic characters do not exactly make words. They are more like utterances that act as place markers when words fail. Her focus upon words as empty fillers is clever; the statuarys are as inarticulate as we oftentimes seem. But it is difficult to sum up if the bland computer animations and prints are meant to make notes on the rote manipulation of logo in advertisements, or if they are simply unimaginative in design. The multimedia approach more oftentimes seems redundant than imperative, as if the artist were groping for the right medium.

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