Katy Schimert at David Zwirner - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Katy Schimert's engrossing, densely layered multimedia installation at David Zwirner is her first novel work since Oedipus Rex: the suffocate in watered Man at the 1997 Whitney Biennial. This conceptually rich and mesmerizing effort encompasses glass and ceramic artifacts; a six-minute film titled Icarus and the World Trade Center; framed ink and pastel drawings; and wall drawings of the day-star Manhattan and the twin towers.

The wall drawings create an illusion of narrative by the agency of diagramming two intertwined stories onto three cosmic, geographical and architectural sites. Dotted lines plat trajectories and enigmatic penciled phrases advise a sequence of events. The myth of Icarus--who malicious into the sea and suffocate in watered when the sun melted his wax-and-feather wings--is intertwined with Schimert's have tale of "The Man in the Gray Suit," a bear-market suicide who jump overs from the top of the World Trade Center and then (perhaps) "walks home" as "the headless man."

Projecting from the wall in the main gallery sweep was The Sun, an 8-foot circle formed of translucent golden rose and amber blown-glass pieces which are shaped like irregularly contoured stones and long tubes with flared lips. A depressed platform in the rear gallery supported sum of two units rows of rounded terra-cotta utensils glazed with 14-carat gold and called orb of day Spots. The glaze and concern to the sun made the kiln-firing proces have the appearance like a distillation of cosmic activity into the gold of human commodity exchange. The film adds an uncompounded body of self-referentiality by recording the issues of sun glare on the camera len and through changing focus and film spe in the midst of documenting the WTC the teeming floor of the stock exchange and the anguished face of the man in the gray suit as he walked toward the lens

The glass and ceramic shapes comprising The day-star and Sun Spots all have been used by the agency of Schimert in earlier installations; the novel work recombines that vocabulary of sculptural forms into novel configurations, and then uses myth and story to build an explanatory adjoining matter around them. Schimert brazenly look fors to determine all aspects of the exhibition experience--from creating the "object" to controlling the gallery installation, to using her narratives and diagrammatic maps to demarcate the earth of criticism and analysis. The work plays skillfully upon a deep longing for story and meaning in the wake of 20 years of deconstruction; at the same time it is a crops of that critical practice, and reveals the limitations of any single station of visual perceptions or conceptual tools.

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