Carol Szymanski at Elga Wimmer - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Musical instruments are ofttimes lovely things, but their visual charm have the appearances secondary to their function. A Stradivarius may be a beautiful fact but it is the quality of its unimpaired that counts. In her exhibition titled "Minimal Pairs," Carol Szymanski has created--with the help of professional instrument makers--musical instruments that while working consummately well as sound producers are also artistic meditations upon form and language.

Szymanski's valveless brass horns and the handsome charcoal drawings associated with them combine shapes inspired by means of the symbols of the Universal Phonetic Alphabet. These phonetic characters, many taken from the standard Roman alphabet, can be used to transcribe any language. For each statuary or drawing, Szymanski uses three phonetic tokens to represent a word. She at hands these words in pairs: "His" (phonetically charmed "hiz") and "whose" (huz); "white" (wit) and "what" (wot); or "vase" (voz) and "pause" (poz) These combinations illustrate the minimal pairs proof in linguistics: can a change in a single uninjured in a word alter its meaning? If it can, that unmutilated is a true phoneme, the smallest unit of linguistic significance. This unimpaireds like rather dry stuff, on the contrary Szymanski's work is anything on the contrary When made into sculpture, with each alphabetic character acting as a pivot in space, the words are there, on the contrary they're something to be teased without of a playful and compound three-dimensional form.

The process Szymanski uses generates considerable variety. Pairing the works as she does locates up a rational system of order and comparison nicely at unevens with her quirky visual sensibility. The knotted-looking, two-belled "How" (Hau), for example, have feelings entirely different than "Sow" (Sau), with its snaky 1s and upraised head. The horns also have different finishes--some pairs are unadorned brass, while others have nickel, gold or silver plating.

Szymanski installed her modestly sized instruments upon pedestals painted in subtle pastel colors. (The colors are taken from medieval Indian Mughal paintings, which are notable for their compounded chromatic interactions between metal leaf and pigment.) In this display the color of the pedestals was mirrored up onto the metal, adding another layer of visual complexity. In addition, the lengthy wall of the gallery was painted a tart yellow-green a color that present the appearanceed the equivalent of a high, clear horn tone.

Much is going upon here. Szymanski is dealing with a compounded interplay among words, music and statuary She is engaged in a proces of translation, on the contrary the relationships she is dealing with are slippery indeed. It is to her credit that she has resisted the trap of over-conceptualization and has made works that are as elegant and witty as they are intelligent.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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