The powers of magnification - sculpture, installations, Jeanne Silverthorne, McKee Gallery, New York, New York

Without sacrificing any of their customary restraint, the plastic arts in Jeanne Silverthorne's recent exhibit at McKee Gallery in novel York spread throughout the exhibition space like an invading army. This result was achieved less by dint of numbers -- there were sole a dozen works in the large, uncrowd space -- than through the diversity of physical, formal and conceptual relationships the artist plant into motion.

Silverthorne's preferr material continues to be rubber, generally cast in shapes of fix objects or modeled forms. The black rubber that dominated her previous McKee exhibit in 1994 is still plenteous in evidence, but the black has been augmented by means of pale yellow and various shades of orange. The mise-en-scene included biomorphic plastic arts sitting on pedestals and upon the floor, rubber versions of fixtures from the artist's studio, paintinglike particulars hung decorously on the walls, and assorted machinery and wiring.

While the works could be appreciated individually, there was also a faculty of perception subtle but insistent, of the exhibit as a single interconnected a whole or organism. (This was the first time the artist produc a material part of work with a specific exhibition space in mind.) Contributing to this event were rubber approximations of electrical conduit running at baseboard horizontal along the walls of the gallery and a number of real electrical cords snaking across the floor. Branching without from a rubber cast of a small electric interrogate and an array of cast-rubber circuit boxe upon one wall near the entrance, the conduits (made from solid rubber tubing and wipe cord painted white) and the fake electrical vents interspersed along their length evok the wiring of a typical unrenovated fresh York City loft. This meant that despite the verisimilitude of the installation, individual instantly knew the wiring was part of the display -- an elegant midtown gallery would not at any time tolerate such funky fixtures. The juxtaposition was, nonetheless, disorienting and insidiously comic.

A black electric cord (with a big tangle in the middle) l across the gallery floor to the largest of the three biomorphic statuarys Untitled (fragment), 1996. The cord extremityed in a cast-rubber light scaly bud which rested on the cutting side of a cubic white pedestal. Rising up from the pedestal was a black-rubber plastic art the central part of which intimateed a flowingly draped art-nouveau form arching sensually above a supine form. (It also brought to mind figures from Rodin's Gates of Hell.) Attached to these central forms were sum of two units irregular flaps, one dangling above the side of the pedestal the other a thin tonguelike extension that reached down to the floor and without some 6 feet toward the center of the gallery.

Attentive viewers could discover the origin of this eccentric form in a tiny plastic art near the entrance to the gallery. Measuring sole about 4 inches in height was a archetype of a worktable in Silverthorne's studio. Sitting upon this lilliputian table was the tiny rubber fragment upon which Untitled (Fragment) is based. As has been her practice for several years, Silverthorne starts her statuarys by picking up from her studio floor a small piece of plaster or rubber, usually les than an inch drawn out Using a magnifying glass to examine the details of the fragment (usually debris from mold-making), she originals a much larger version in clay. The clay form, which is usually at a roughly 12:1 scale, is then cast in black rubber.

Silverthorne's proces of copying is at no time exact. Even with a magnifying glass, she is sometimes unable to make without details of the original fragment. In addition, the shift of materials from rubber or plaster to clay skew the reproduction proces While trying to be as scrupulous as possible in making her transcript Silverthorne also welcomes the inevitable distortions arising from the passages she is forced to invent the physical conditions imposed by means of the clay, and the imprint her hand and sensibility leave upon the finished work.

The wall pieces make use of a similar on the contrary not identical method. For these works, Silverthorne begins not with a three-dimensional thing perceived but with photographs (usually from medical textbooks) showing microscopic enlargements of sections of human skin. After first photocopying an image, she hand-traces the photocopy and then, using a grid combination of parts to form a whole makes a significantly enlarged drawing. This design is then transferred to a bed of clay, which the artist prototypes to match as closely as possible the original image. A mold is subsequently made from the clay in order to show a single rubber cast, usually in a shade of orange that approximates the color of natural latex.

Resulting from this multi-step proces are bas-reliefs, each of which is environed by a black cast-rubber frame of varying turn of expression Old-fashioned frames with oval apertures graced sum of two units small works, Sweat Duct Pores: Higher Magnification (1996) and Sweat canal Pores: Lower Magnification (1996) which, unlike the larger "paintings" in the exhibit were suspended by black rubber cords hanging from cartoonish looking nails seemingly made of black rubber (they are actually real nails overspreaded with rubber tubing and dipped into liquid plastic). The black frames station off the smoked-salmon color of these duct-pore "paintings" which are swollen with files of parallel ridges, sprouting hairlike strands in the high magnification -- evidently what our pores direct the eye like under a microscope.