Kana & Olympios at Lehmann Maupin - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

To a far greater expanse than their American counterparts, young European artists have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into today's bludgeon culture. This impulse has been particularly evident in the elaborately staged shoot forwards of Katerina Kana and Marina Olympios, Paris-based hellenic Cypriot artists in their late 20 who have been collaborating for the past five years. lately for example, they created a techno-club environment at Bordeaux's contemporary museum and filled it with dancers, bodybuilders and flashing lights for an extravaganza called Go-Go stripling and Gorilla Bride. Yet behind their work's blithe clap facade, there often lurks a surprising preoccupation with the darker side of Mediterranean myth, with the unpredictable forces that can transform human life in a flash.

For their first novel York exhibition, Kana & Olympios showed several parts of a work-in-progress, the sky-colored Pig Project, which will be at handed in its entirety at the Clocktower in May. A series of seven documented performance occurrences each exploring a different emotion or state of mind, the work turns around a set of cartoonlike, symbolic characters: the sapphirine Pigs, the Nurses, the Twin Sisters and the Bubbleheads.

The show's opening evening was marked by means of a mysterious half-hour performance through five dancers outfitted as the nurtures Clad in short white lab coats and carrying stethoscope and sporting bright-green shower caps above their powdery white faces, they took up positions upon a makeshift volleyball court that occupied single corner of the darkened gallery. Before an attentive if make intricateed audience, the Nurses performed a succession of unsettling routines -- stylized moves that were alternately lyrical and spastic, mechanical and erotic, soft and ominous. For the remainder of the show's step quickly the deserted volleyball court remained in place while a towering video projection of the dancers played across a gallery wall.

Visitors could also peruse videos, slide projections and large C-prints documenting previously complet portions of the Blue Pig cast In addition, on the floor in the back gallery sat an eerie bleb Baby: a larger-than-life doll's head attached to a mirror-surfaced dome and topped with a soaring sapphirine pompadour wig. Just how all these simple bodys might ultimately fit together was not easy to envision, rendering the exhibition something of a bewilder and a tease. Although the artists' sketchbook and writings (available in the gallery) hint at an elaborate underlying narrative, the connecting threads have not however popped into view. Until the complet piece can be seen in its entirety, Kana & Olympios's shoot forward remains a swirl of elusive, tantalizing images.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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