Rita McBride at Alexander Bonin - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Dignifying unamiable spaces and banal structures is single of sculpture's big jobs. frequently it's work done outdoors. Rita McBride takes the task inside, reconciling modernist rectitude and the fallen reality of the built world in studies of a small in number basic design units: the urban garage, the cafe chair, the commercial awning.

Four small cast-bronze protoplasts of garages anchored the exhibition. individual is of a no-frills six-floor car park, with a spiral ramp permitting access to each floor; at this scale, just beneath 2 feet high, the ramp direct the eyes like a big auger. smooth plainer is a warehouse-style garage with a relentlessly simple gridded exterior; this building was showed twice, possibly to hint at the infinitude of its possible replication. The last garage was installed at picture-height in a corner of the gallery. This, a three-story archetype shows parsimony's more appealing side: it's frolic to see the floors snipped apart and bent, like wound paper, to make the ramps that unite them.

Burnished, stolid and formally assured these sculptures don't so abundant celebrate un-sung architecture as make minimally visible buildings that aren't meant to be seen at all (except maybe, by the agency of garage attendants). A few other artists appear relevant to this work -- Mary Ellen Carroll, for her two-dimensional analyses of parking-lot patterns, and Joel Shapiro, for his early miniature tin houses. But McBride is distinguished by the agency of the deftness with which she strips the decorated shed bare, leaving it more naked than modernism at any time intended.

The other statuarys shown are made of Murano glass (the kind that's used for Venetian jewelry). A svelte seatless bistro-style chair is returned in a lovely caramel-colored glass, held together with wide strips of clear plastic tape. below the gallery's skylight, and upon axis with its entrance, was a clear-glass frame for an eyebrow-curv awning, its hardware shiny brass. And, as the show's centerpiece, there was a substantial section of a space frame -- the modular structural unit, assembled from tetrahedrons, that makes possible enormous lateral spans like those of shopping malls and sports stadiums. McBride has fabricated it in yellowish groov glass slender stems its connections made of undressed lumps of polished bronze.

Those meteorite-ish shapeless masss suggest McBride's finely calibrated faculty of perception of humor, and evoke other veins too. Here the range was from the jocund -- as in an oversize bump of burgundy-red glass grapes, big and luscious as any in a Caravaggio bacchanal -- to the poignant: at the gallery's entrance was a black-and-white photograph showing the faint gray trace, upon a slightly grimy blank facade, of a vanished awning. It was shaped just like the single McBride has made in glass. The prevailing tone, however, was the kind of silent fortitude that might as easily conceal a giggle as a despairing sigh.

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