Alexis Rockman at Jay Gorney - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Looking at Alexis Rockman's new work, it is easy to imagine the artist as a young lad standing before the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, gradually realizing that nature can be construct agained in fictional narratives. Now, after years of contemplating the museum's authoritative vignettes, Rockman mimics them in "Dioramas," an exhibition of kitschy tableaux that combine trompe-l'oeil painting with digitized photographs, trash, clothing, animal carcasses and a variety of other artifacts, all preserv below several inches of resin. In these 1997 works he depicts the natural world's adaptive aims in environments altered by intrusions like as suburbs, airports and highways, not to mention tourism through nature-lovers like himself.

The Rec-Room (48 through 40 by 3 3/4 inches) depicts the nasty business behind the faux-wood paneling of a suburban residential interior as a squirrel and mouse copulate in a nest feathered with insulation and shredd publicity The foreground is a sheet of paneling, out and out with an electrical outlet and a framed print in which three dogs are shown playing poker A cutout in the paneling allows a view into the rodents' nest the dimensionality of which is astonishing. [i]or[/i] part of to the other a hole that appears to have been chewed in the outside wall at the back of the nest a meeting-house steeple is seen in the distance. on the other hand the busy rodents are oblivious to human notions like sin, as plenteous as they are to the termites eating at the house's structure

Still, in this litigate nature clearly is at a disadvantage. Another "Diorama" deposits us on a painted wild highway disappearing into a remembrancer Valley sunset. The vista is marred by dint of a Frankensteinian roadkill in the foreground (pieces of dead animals below the resin). The mishap has occurr near a sign warning drivers to brake for jackalopes, a mythic Western hybrid of rabbit and antelope. In another work, a actual hybrid, the mule, is propp up by means of a barn wall hung with S&M paraphernalia, her buttocks branded and her front leg replaced by the agency of a metal crutch.

Rockman does not let off himself from corruption: in The Ecotourist he depicts his have rotting corpse; tiny parasites share his muscle and fat with seedlings and birds of spoil An enlargement of a microscope view and a helpful diagram high hilled under the resin identify the actors in his putrefaction. While mammals have drawn out provided meat for predators in museum dioramas, it is startling to clash human death as a matter-of-fact ultimate part in natural history's familiar round of years of life. Perhaps the rethinking of dioramas in Rockman's work -- as well as in that of Mark Dion and Gregory Crewdson -- will have an impact upon the institutions that formed these artists' views of nature.

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