Doris Salcedo at Brooke Alexander - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Doris Salcedo is a Colombian artist whose statuarys and installations mark the los of human lives to political violence in her native geographical division Her first one-person show in the United States, titled "La Casa Viuda" (The Widowed House), comprised just sum of two units frail, jerry-built assemblages of tall, narrow made of wood doors combined with parts of furniture and other collaged materials. single work was placed at the real back of the large entrance gallery and the other in the doorway between this and the adjacent, destitute of contents room, so that the overwhelming first impression was of lone-some vacancy. All the empty space have the appearanceed to demand quiet, and spectators remained notably hushed in their viewing.

upon closer inspection, however, the sum of two units assemblages proved materially dense and metaphorically charged with anthropomorphic allusions. Onto public broken-down household furnishings - a drawerless bureau, table leg a chair seat - were grafted snippets of materials with shut up connections to human bodies - a zipper, a patch of woven fabric bone. Bone inlay, for example, "repairs" a drawn out crack in the surface of a bureau; a lace skirt hangs from a door beneath and behind a chair, and has left a faint impression of flowers upon the chair's legs. Both works call up the stiff postures of seated figures, uncomfortable, waiting. The doors in "La Casa Viuda" are poignant, vigilant on the other hand exceedingly dysfunctional. Worn and pitted with use on the contrary now dismissed from that use, they no longer lay open from one space to another on the other hand are surrounded by open space.

Unnatural combinations of materials make of the assemblages something monstrous and inexplicable; once-familiar particulars are rendered uncanny. The more "personal" materials, like as the zipper, become single with objects of which they are not normally part. Furniture thereby commemorates the tribe who once used it, who may no longer be known in individual These objects stand for survivors, for witnesses to oppression or terror in Salcedo's political division or elsewhere, who carry a persistent somatic recollection. Salcedo's political testimony is not didactic. Expressing a condition more than a demand, it is powerful precisely because it is too inscrutable to be easily read.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group