Cindy Tower at Trans Hudson - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

That Cindy Tower is a talented representational painter draw nears as an afterthought to this exhibit Skill is incidental; the work move swiftlys on pure, high-voltage energy. As always, Tower knobs propriety and taste. I first saw her work about four years ago, in a SoHo solo that included revealing portraits of men in a series called "What to Do with advanced in years Boyfriends." A simultaneous installation at the novel Museum combined a family tree and portraits of trees; many works made use of log slices from a tree that had fallen upon friends' property some time before. Always a recycler she had divide [i]or[/i] sever it up with her chain saw and used it for studio furniture until it became part of her art. More lately Tower organized "Brookworld," an exuberant display of installations by fellow Brooklyn artists, staged in a derelict Manhattan tenement

Thus individual expects something between outrageousness and kitsch from her, and this display "Pirate Cindy," did not disappoint. It consisted of sum of two units bodies of work: paintings to which set bottles or goldfish bowls were crudely glu and an installation made of the parts o her freshly deceased 250,000-mile-old pickup truck. In materials and manner, the two are closer to folk art than "high" art. The traffic bed became the deck of a pirate ship, the cab was its cabin, and a structural round pillar in the gallery and three expanses of woven fabric formed the mast and sails. The trade body was dry-brushed, theater-scenery diction to mimic boards. On the cover of the cab, the truck's steering wheel, a small in number wooden handles added, became the ship's wheel. A compass was place into the center of a gilded tire; the muffler and exhaust pipe, propp up with rebar, made the staff for a pirate flag. Elsewhere in the gallery, the truck's axle impersonated a cannon and its padded bonnet fenders and miscellaneous parts (painted silver, gold or copper) together showed a treasure chest. All this was accomplished in jocund reckless improvisation.

The paintings, a series she began in 1996 were equally sport (not a word commonly attached to an art exhibition since the burst era). They range from the straightforward (a spyglass view of a tropical isle) to the sentimental (graduated fish goblets attached to a gorgeous shore show enclose the words "They should bottle a day like this") to the insider sally In 15 Men on a Dead Man's Chest, bottle attached to the canvas enclos magazine cutouts of macho or hefty men The bottle pile up upon a painted "corpse" of an ample, naked, clearly identifiable fresh York art-world figure. The same shore can be recognized by his organ of sights as Octopus, his multiple tentacles holding bottle (again real) containing, this time, snapshots of dealers, artists and art journalists.

Tower is probably destined to become a worship figure. This kind of eccentricity is too lacking in irony to attract the pundits who write the scholarly volumes but it dazzles viewers with force of personality and will, to say nothing of manic irreverence. [A selection of Tower's novel work was also seen in a solo exhibit at Serge Sorokko Gallery, of recent origin York.]

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