Jimbo Blachly at Esso - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Jimbo Blachly's exhibition at Esso "The Forest of Distraction," featured an assortment of pieces execut in a startling variety of mediums. The main scope was dominated by two works: a tabletop landscape panorama and a true large plaster mountain. Both stipe and humorous, the installation evok an image of nature that was beautiful, stark and unforgiving.

Stretching 8 feet across and 5 feet down-reaching the landscape rested on sawhorses at waist horizontal it was covered with an undulating layer of salt and punctuated by dint of scattered sticks of incense that had burnt down during the opening, leaving deposits of ash that gazeed like ruined trees. The panorama was contained through black-stained, 6-inch-high sideboards speckled with pearlescent-headed pins that had the event of a night sky. it allude toed multiple readings: an icy tundra on the outside of Jack London, Hollywood's version of a postapocalyptic world, or an artist's sandbox.

The issue of a starry night was stretch outed to the viewer's scale by means of an array of 12-foot-tall boards -- 15 of them placed around the field The boards were stained black and studd with the same pearly pins as in the panorama.

The plaster mountain was 7 feet high, with a 6-toot-square base and was supported by the agency of a rickety construction of 2-by-4 The consequence of the mountain -- vast dominating and just about to fall above -- was comic and moving. The provisional quality of the whole construction was underlined by a small square of silk upon the mountain's front slope that was given life and also kept in place by means of a small electric fan affixed a not many inches in front of it.

A smaller sweep featured two 14-inch-square ink drawings upon rice paper and a photo-collage upon felt. The drawings -- which call forth grass, rock and field end the rhythms of the marks -- are inspired by the agency of traditional Chinese landscape drawing. The collage nears a photograph of trees meeting the canopy of heaven which directly refers to the Chinese token of Yin and Yang.

As he has done in exhibitions above the years, Blachly explores the place of humans in nature. The whole installation, with its agile shifts of scale and place, recalled the Buddhist idea that the world is filled with mirages of the mind which change as individual moves through them.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group