Rachel Khedoori and Toba Khedoori at David Zwirner - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

These Australian-born sisters, now based in sees Angeles, do not collaborate in the conventional faculty of perception Yet viewers of this, their first fresh York show, could discern a shared touch with the ways in which memory is erected - often (as all detectives know) on the outside of bits and pieces of vicarious experience.

Rachel Khedoori filled each of the sum of two units gallery spaces with a scattering of readymade percepts that at first seemed completely unrelated on the other hand soon revealed subtle correspondences - and hints of an implied narrative - within and between the sum of two units installations. On the floor in the first field a video monitor continuously not awayed a slightly disconcerting fountain-in-the-desert view The unsteady, seemingly hand-held view includes a gorgeous sky-colored sky, brushy hills, sand, rustling palm tree and a large pile of stones over which water spills in three abundant streams. To single side of the monitor, a lamp with single bare bulb sat on a azure blanket in front of a white backdrop, accompanied by dint of a few dried-up palm leaves and a sprinkling of dirt. upon the other side, a next to the first monitor, mounted on a small table and enclos upon three sides by a white partition, dispayed the video image of a pott palm.

similar echoes between an Edenic elsewhere - half-fantasized, half-remembered - and a bleak, haphazard, incomplete not absent continued in what appeared to be a section of brick wall separated through in the pattern of an ancient urn and laid flat upon the floor next to a pool of chocolate. Nearby stood a folding table with clamped-on foam-core walls. More chocolate (evoking fece and blood) had been splattered onto the far corner from a spray fire-arm now resting on the floor - evidence persisting in the still aftermath of forceful action.

In the back gallery, scores of chiefly overexposed Polaroid snapshots of simple bodys from the first installation were arranged upon a folding table (emblematic of instability and transience) that also held a tiny monitor showing us an Eastern monk in meditation. Beside the table was a metal-and-canvas chair soaked in chocolate. Thus individual work of art, with the history of its material creation, could be apprehended [i]or[/i] part of to the other another. But photographic representation, as this at one time fragmentary and obsessive documentation attested, is rife with the dangers of navel-gazing: sitting enmired in a sickly sweet theory, while reality retreats to a greater and greater remove

Toba Khedoori's one 11-by-19 1/2-foot painting, rendered in wax and oil upon three large sheets of paper stapled to the wall, portrays a delicately counterbalanced high-rise construction crane. Nothing of Rachel's surrounding clatter its ugliness a deliberate affront to conventional esthetics, go intos this austere visual field. The building constituents to be stacked into a semblance of meaning may approach later, thereby rehearsing the dialectic between randomness and order. on the contrary for one exquisite moment we are invited to contemplate the skeletal mechanism itself, an elegant metaphor for the artist's elevating rule amid chaos.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group