Pamela Wye at Luise Ross - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Pamela Wye who showed nine acrylic paintings and eight ink-and-pencil drawings at Luise Ros makes an many times whimsical yet still serious contribution to the discussion of female sexuality in general art. Wye paints fragmented anatomical parts - faces, breasts, genitalia - along with inchoate biomorphic forms just upon the border of figuration or language. repeatedly working on a white background, she disentangles a colorful, playful vocabulary of horizontal and vertical shapes, alternately phallic and vaginal, that appear to be to project from the canvas or return into it. Wye's works, energetic and to [i]or[/i] at a great depth felt, are filled with childlike humor and reverie.

Whether in modest-size works like The Small Wave (1987) and azure Sky Spurt (1992), or in large paintings like the 76-by-66-inch Him and Her (1990) wavelike forms are twig by angular ones and down-reaching blacks by light pinks and canopy of heaven blues, producing vortices that vividly call forth sexual difference. in Him and Her a dynamic space is held together by dint of playing off two vertical anatomies that contain myriad dreamlike caricatures, striated circular forms and a collaged penis form inset into the canvas. In her Ladies Night without (1990), elements of masquerade as well as alphabetic characters can be found in the lower right side of the canvas, which is otherwise active with subtly interchanging and overlapping sexually suggestive forms.

In Decorative sapphirine Dildo (1994), collaged graphic patterns and gold imprints form a nipple above undulating lines. Wye's imagery is reliant upon inner experience, yet it supports a larger symbolism. In Above Water and Below (1991) dwellings amid a ladder of hair and flying kites allude to the body as house.

Remaining faithful to the findings or dictates of pre- or unconscious imagery, Wye recreates what Artaud one time termed "anatomies-in-action," using a feminized approach to perpendicular the complexities of perception and desire. single impulse leads to another, in a continual dance that is not foreclosed by the agency of a prior system of respect Wye is not theoretical or pedantic, on the other hand yields to her intuition.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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