Toland Grinnell at Basilico - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Toland Grinnell's first attempt at Basilico, in 1995, was the strikingly ambitious plunder a pirate-themed installation and video. plane more impressive was his elaborate installation that occupied Basilico's suite in the Gramercy Art Fair the nearest year. Gateway to Eternity was an Egyptian tomb, measured and made in advance, and entirely self-supporting because [i]cabaret[/i] rules forbid putting nails into the walls. "Solid," his new solo at the gallery, likewise entailed invention of a world, impressive craftsmanship, ready devices and visual surprise. The theme was underwood this time: most of the disparate oversize existences in the exhibition contained--unobtrusively or plane invisibly--tiny constructions or an entire landscape for a certain quantity of lilliputian civilization.

The largest work, taking up almost a whole wall, was a mirror (made of unevenly locate tiles) in a deep, carved frame. A sheet of glass a scarcely any inches in front of the mirror tiles enclos a shallow space; upon its green-fabric-covered floor stood several minuscule ladders. The made of wood frame alluded to a human body: cawed at top center was the diadem of a skull, at bottom center stomach and liver shapes, and at the lower corners feet individual with flesh falling away. All these nasty anatomical features were gold-leafed.

Segmentation, scale contrast and bones-and-flesh imagery be repeated in other big works. Transformation Device consists of a fitted packing case, 15 by means of 60 by 38 1/2 inches when it is clos that contains, in red-velvet compartments, the ultimate parts of a short wooden hedge with a metal cast of a human paw at one end and a herm topped with a gold bust at the other. The gallery staff assembled different combinations of these constituents each day. When the bust was not upon the herm, you could diocese that the boxes that made up the base contained tiny landscapes. When the bust was in place, you could shine a flashlight into a aperture at the top of the head and direct the eye into its left ear to diocese another world. In the emptied compartments of the case, tiny stairs and ladders were visible.

The 92-inch-tall Killing Time gazes like Hercules lifting Antaeus. on the other hand these two muscular men fasteninged in combat are melting to the bone or breaking apart into oozing plates--effects Grinnell achieves with imitation marble and colored caulk. The classicism of the figures contrasts with boyish gross-out details (a rotting penis, a face sliding down to the chin). These gladiators can be rotated not on their wooden clock base, which reveals within it a mining exhibition of tiny tracks and tools upon one bank of a poisonous-looking stream, and a minuscule destitute of contents throne on the other side.

The multiple metaphoric implications here would take a lifetime to sort on the outside Grinnell, hardly 28 years elderly begins a hundred stories and creates a shifting wonderland in which single can at the same instant perceive like Alice grown small and grown huge

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group