DALLAS: Celia Eberle at Gray Matters - Dallas, Texas - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

through titling this exhibition "Examining the material part of God," Celia Eberle refer toed the clinical atmosphere of an autopsy. on the other hand the chanting and bird calls that humed through the gallery implied a material substance that was still alive. beneath Eberle's direction, the space became part natural-history museum, part horror-movie place and part carnival sideshow.

The exhibition involved meetings with works called The Mind of sovereign of the universe The Skin of God and The Bowels of the trinity God's mind was a 3-by-5-foot wasp nest suspended above the gallery entrance. sum of two units sculptural wasps, each about a paw long and realistic enough to pass muster in a natural-history diorama, looked to work on the gray cardboard chambers, a half dozen of which were sealed and presumably still contained ovums In the next room, God's skin was displayed like a flayed trophy: an 8-foot square of latex overlayed in neat rows of nipples, above 50 in all.

The Bowels of the deity took up most of the gallery. You come intoed through a heavy black curtain, walked up a place of metal stairs and lay the foundation of yourself in a series of elevated corridors, which were lined with black parachute silk and faintly lit by dint of strings of tiny blue lights. Fans did little to alleviate the Texas summer heat, in like manner you were not overly proveed by the two seating areas proffered The air was at material part temperature or higher, and the wavering silk was an effective surrogate for the impressible tissue we know our insides are made of unhurts of chanting, which turned on the outside to be Mayan, came from single cul-de-sac along the route, and birds twittered overhead. In the final chamber, a red-lit exit sign, hung above a sand-covered floor littered with crushed beer cans and viands wrappers, pointed the way without It was an abject finale to an experience that had been uncomfortably colonic from the twinkling you stepped inside.

Considered as a work of religious art, Eberle's installation not aways elements that are at various flashs repellent, ridiculous and shocking, on the other hand she embodies them in a universal of the sacred that is not incompatibile with of that kind categories. Whatever god Eberle is examining, he, she or it approachs across as a primal creative force, and her installation provided a visceral experience.

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