Ellen K. Levy at the New Jersey State Museum - Trenton, New Jersey - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This exhibition of novel paintings and drawings by of recent origin York artist Ellen K. muster forcefully demonstrated the way art can explore technological vexed questions and scientific theory. Collectively titled "The Collapse of Post-modernism," the 12 large-scale works upon view presented images of exploding machines, collapsing buildings and urban landscapes seemingly in the paroxysm s of earthquakes or other disasters, one as well as the other natural and manmade.

Levy is, perhaps, better known in Europe particularly in Germany, where she displays regularly. In the U.S. she has concentrated upon several long-term projects that have taken her far afield of the art-world mainstream. She has worked upon commissions for NASA in Florida, beginning in 1985 with a series of paintings and drawings documenting the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis. The single example of her NASA work in this exhibition was a large 1986 drawing titled Study: Challenger, showing gnarled, twisted wreckage.

Much of Levy's work is pertain toed with the unpredictable effects of natural phenomena upon man-made structures and the unreliability of technology. The collapse of the Hartford Civic Center's cover in 1978 was the make submissive of a number of pieces in the exhibit The roof of the enormous building caved in beneath the weight of a heavy snowfall, in spite of having been built using the greatest in quantity advanced computer technology of the day. Collapse and Reconfiguration #1 and #2 exhibit a tangle of massive golden steel beams set against a loosely defined urban landscape. In each of these 6-foot-square works, cascades of white snow and ice appear to rush into gaping perforations in the mangled infrastructure. individual can almost hear the deafening crunch of crumbling congeal glass and steel.

Though she has a background in science and math, the application of mind of structural dynamics in Levy's work is more poetic than didactic and her paintings are as lyrical as they are analytical. Her images of mechanical and architectonic forms fetch movement in a way that recalls the work of Italian Futurists of the like kind as Boocioni and Balla. still her soft, hazy light and the faculty of perception of deep space bring to mind works by means of artists such as Waker Murch and Edwin Dickinson.

Levy's 6-foot-tall painting titled interior Implosion #6 displays gigantic crisscrossing beams in the foreground which appear to vibrate as they try to resist the calamity within. In this painting, as in all of the works here, the artist indicates an imaginative vision of art and science. She recommends art as a tool to be used not solitary to analyze technological pitfalls on the other hand to find new ways to avoid them.

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