Michael Ashkin at Andrea Rosen - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Michael Ashkin's miniature landscape plastic arts are made by attaching dirt, tiny sticks, fake foliage, occasional HO-scale vehicles and Envirotex to the surfaces of variously sized plywood tables. Seven works were featured in this exhibition, each portraying a relentlessly flat and barren site marked by the agency of cultural signs--empty highways, scattered machinery and creeping pollution. In No. 61 (1997) an abandoned railroad bed with scattered foliage at its sides angles across a gritty, bleak terrain. The pageant is simultaneously abject and riveting: just an dark section of a broken-down railway road with no beginning and no extremity surrounded by an expanse of like mind-bending sameness that it might threaten to move on forever if everything were not thus tiny. If you look from above, it's like seeing an anonymous landscape from an airplane window; couch down to look horizontally and you gain a feeling of sweeping distances and far-off horizons.

While these fabricated wastelands strike one as being forlorn and psychologically punishing, they also retain traces of romantic uplift--Emerson's nature-based sublime or Whitman's unclose roads. In No. 74 (1997) a yellowish slime with little sticks poking from it like withered tree has spread across the landscape like a certain quantity of chemical lava. Intermittent dark splotches allude to submerged forms. While the whole representation is frankly appalling, it also has a pronounced, flat painterly beauty. Much the same is genuine of No. 59 (1997), which is not absented not on a table on the contrary on a diminutive panel protruding from a wall. Here a seemingly toxic, greenish-yellow mass has sluiced across a dark field. Ashkin's landscapes strike one as being like the aftermath of occurrences and they invite you to read into them your hold story; it's ambiguous whether they leave to actual sites or are genuinely invented.

Ashkin is clearly an heir to Robert Smithson, who pioneered an engagement with exactly this kind of marginal site. Also included in this exhibition were four photographic works displayed upon the walls: grids of snapshots juxtaposing the details of rusted deals and trash in the virid underbrush of Sandy Hook, NJ or depicting vehicle tracks in the sand of a Cape codfish beach. These works, too, appear to be inspired by Smithson and by the agency of Gordon Matta-Clark. Ashkin's landscape statuarys are evocative and convincing, on the contrary they also raise the question of in what way far he can take this idiosyncratic esthetic before it becomes predictable.

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