Sandy Winters at George Adams - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Sandy Winters's materially and emotionally exuberant exhibition consisted of a drawn, painted and collaged wall installation titled new Cuts (1997-98), a smaller individual called In Progress (1998), and four smallish works upon paper from 1997. Winters depicts forms that have the appearance simultaneously derived from machinery and from nature and which loan themselves to a variety of readings. ofttimes the works feel funkily irreverent and comically erotic; sometimes, too, they gaze like Rube Goldberg contraptions meant to intimate the physically overwhelming workings of a whole s outside our control.

new Cuts was a huge collage that followed the contours of the gallery space. Made of aluminum, canvas, cardboard and charcoal, it sprawled across a lengthy wall and two smaller adjacent walls, creating a J-shaped installation. The mix of scraggy materials -- stamped tin ceiling panels, plywood newspapers and cardboard -- gave the work an improvisational air, although single in which an abstract narrative strike one as beinged to play out. In Winters's work, single thing leads to another; the scrawled forms, with their carefully worked without proportions of parts, suggest the repetitive motions seen in factory machines, as well as the interactions of bodies during sex The work was a diagram of irregularly organic plumbing: on the left extreme point a big, bulbous stomach shape yielded to a series of thick pipes. in the middle, joined to the pipes, was a certain quantity of sort of industrial scrubber; at its bottom was a disk that had wires projecting from its sides. Winters created a hybrid world of diverting but also slightly threatening, composite objects

Her interest in improvisation was evident in the small site-specific installation In Progres During the course of the exhibit as visitors watched, Winters drew in conte and charcoal upon four plywood panels covered with blackboard paint. Polaroid snapshots documented changes in a big, slate-blue furnacelike device from which emanated shapes conflating factory tools and implements of war. In a action of deliberate openness, Winters allowed visitors to inquiry an unfinished work and to review her decisions.

The four drawings in the exhibit furthered the artist's desire to devise a world of natural machinery. This is not in the way that much a paradox as a conundrum in which delight is a primary virtue. The fans, gaskets and pipes don't make any functional faculty of perception and that's Winters's point exactly. She means to deprave through laughter, and she succeeds

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