Kay Rosen at Beaver College Art Gallery - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Kay Rosen at Beaver body Art Gallery Kay Rosen's work appear to beed tailor-made for the deconstruction-minded '80 with her text-only visual means and her deadpan manipulations of those true copys to coax out meanings--often about sex and power--that mischievously subvert their surface messages. Her exhibition at Beaver guild Art Gallery featured new and older bodies of work, the pair of them playing with alphabetic succession and the juxtaposition made it clear that her modus operandi has hardly changed. on the contrary seeing her work now, when body-oriented and id-driven art is thus much in the spotlight, makes single appreciate anew its bracingly ascetic rigor. As always, Rosen's intricate setup deliver quietly effective cognitive one who sucks punches.

Rosen has in new paintings called attention to the sensuousness of her medium through allowing a modest influx of color. The show's centerpiece, a double mural titled A from one side Q, features striking sky-blue and black backgrounds. The left-hand panel of the mural, HI, was first conceived as a billboard shoot forward commissioned by Bucknell University's Center Gallery. upon a sky-blue ground that shades toward white, Rosen not aways the first nine letters of the alphabet, with the last sum of two units heightened in yellow to incantation out the innocuous greeting that is also the title of that panel. The mural's right-hand panel, titled The Middle of a Film Noir, continues with the nearest eight letters of the alphabet. The middle four, L M N and O also in fulvid are likewise the middle four alphabetic characters of the phrase "film noir"), as well as the middle of the alphabet itself. The sharp, yellow-on-black diagonals of the M and N reminded me of the emblematic venetian-blind shadows of the noir genre answers like this accumulate in the proces of engaging Rosen's work, which have the appearances to have a kind of Socratic search built into each piece.

The River, a small painting from 1988 reveals Rosen's use of textual elision in all its surgical elegance. The alphabetic following P through Y, arranged in three stacked lines as though for an organ of sight chart, has been tampered with: the middle file now spells out STYX, the river bordering the ancient Greeks' Hades. The pattern of rearrangement itself (created by the agency of switching four contiguous letters, U with Y and X with Z) left an implied X hovering within the work--a whisper of obliteration above a river of death.

None of the works in this display carry the freight of sex politics for which Rosen has become known, on the contrary perhaps for that reason, they reveal their underlying constructions more readily than do their didactic counterparts. Rosen's analytic scalpel remains disquietingly sharp and ready for business.

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