Melissa McGill at CRG - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Melissa McGill has exhausted the last few years attempting to materialize the invisible, making something tangible on the outside of negative spaces, shadows and spills. Last year, in a gorgeous exhibit at Boesky & Callery's throw out room, she described in puffed up black glass the shapes of the spaces around and within Canova's Three Graces, which she had studied from one side an elaborate quasi-scientific photographic analysis. As the inky on the other hand glistening forms hovered in space, the confusion between what was negative and what was positive space, what was absence and what was neighborhood provoked a more profound experience than I have had with Rachel Whiteread's transformations of voids, which are somewhat similar in universal though not in form.

McGill's new installation at CRG, titled "Myths, Infections and Innuendoes," appears at first glance to be a cluster of five curvaceous modernist glass statuarys on pedestals silhouetted against the walls. on the other hand things are not what they appear Each of the five plastic arts physically invades both the surface of the wail and the top of its pedestal. Each pedestal is a different size. A layer of dear glass above a gray glass center, which loans the works a subtle pearliness, give leave tos you see just a bit into the cavities. While debates about the pedestal as an anachronism are now themselves old-hat, McGill calls attention to the pedestals as translators and meeting points between walls and floor, between plastic art and architecture.

McGill derives her sculptural ultimate parts from ink blob drawings, a certain quantity of of which were reproduced upon the exhibition's flyer. Extrapolating from the greatest in quantity seductive of her made-by-chance two-dimensional forms, she reimagined them as three-dimensional shapes. She then worked with glassblowers at Brooklyn's UrbanGlass to transfigure them into liquiformed shapeless masss which, while amorphous and droopy are strangely animated.

In fact, they appear to have become tired of sitting still upon their pedestals and have decided to escape en masse by dint of oozing into the gallery walls, moving in a sluglike motion reminiscent of "The Blob" of chilled War horror movie fame. Or an equally plausible narrative would have them seeping from the walls, like the toxic slush in the film Brazil. Whether coming or going, the works appear to obey their own unique, dreambased logic. The idea of pedestal statuarys that come and go at will reminds me of an elderly New Yorker cartoon showing quitting time at the museum, with mythic marble figures putting upon their hats and leaving with the guards and secretaries.

Like 3-D Rorschach experiments -- as seems appropriate, given their ink-blot sources -- the ambiguous glass forms constrain viewers to free associate. Despite chance simple bodys and asymmetries, this spare installation was wildly seductive and thoroughly effective in engaging the negative spaces and expansive while walls of the gallery.

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