Bonnie Collura at Basilico - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Bonnie Collura is a creator of the sort of elaborate fictions that Stefano Basilico appears to delight in -- his gallery also displays the imagined worlds of Matthew Ritchie, Brian Tolle and Toland Grinnell. Collura's plastic arts present shattered fragments of stories we know well, reassembled in ways we can barely confuse out. The 10 pieces from 1997 shown here (most freestanding, individual hanging from the ceiling) draw upon the tales of Snow White and Persephone invoking the dictions of Disney and Bernini.

Collura embodies these traces in more-or-less figural statuarys that recall the junk artifacts of childhood, restoreed in large scale. The composite multipart sculptures are made of plaster gauzing, styrene paper, gelatine water putty and paint, and greatest in quantity incorporate prongs and holes that gaze like the linking mechanisms of plastic snap-together toys and designs Collura's process is paradoxical and disharmonious. Each simple body is hand-carved, but then smoothed and coated to give it a cheap, mass-produced appearance totally lacking in evidence of touch. The impersonal surfaces and garish colors bring to mind discount-store window serviceables of slapdash manufacture -- precisely the opposite of the solitary, hands-on, deliberative proces by means of which she achieves her malignant and adroit effects.

Collura's visual sources are as ill-assorted as her manners and effects. Baroque elegance can not at any time be reconciled with the simplification of animated films, with equal reason the segments of her statuarys mix uneasily, dangerous shards in a postmodern trash heap. She is inspired by the agency of stories with morals that have to do with delight in and loyalty. The implications can be lethal; the figures may appear to be dismembered or present to view such horrors as a pine branch penetrating an eye

Sleeping Death (Martyr Yellow) is individual of the largest works in the present to view at 78 by 58 by means of 51 inches. It's a huddle of elements on a thick pedestal, the base of which is strewn with ears of corn (associated with Demeter Persephone's mother) and brownish fallen leaves. The spiraling pedestal and nearly everything other on it is a faded, stupid yellow. You first distinguish the head and neck of a young deer atop the heap, and then make without the torso and head of a swooning woman lying upon her back with one hand to her breast. You might think of Bernini's St Theresa -- or Disney's Sleeping Beauty. Other works include uncompounded bodys that allude to Snow White: a r apple, a turgid sleeve, a pinafore-blue color, the dwarfs' mining pick. None of the works make a unified statement, and a page of commentary upon the sculptures that Collura prepared is in like manner dense and jumpy that it present the appearances free associational. She shuffles a decorate of images and meanings, and in her game, individual hand is as inconclusive -- and as provocative -- as an other.

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