Greg Colson at Sperone Westwater - mixed media art - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

You don't have to be a compulsive orderer to be delighted with Greg Colson's preoccupation with maps, plans, diagrams and other organizational schema. Nor must you adore cast-off materials to appreciate his witty, understated recycling of them. Merging the language of Arte Povera with evocations of various stamps of systems, his terse assemblages celebrate human artifice at the couple its most humble and exalted horizontals using the most ordinary rest materials to portray the greatest in quantity immense achievements of human categorization.

That disparity is ofttimes very charming. Since Colson is like a formalist, his gentle flirtations with breaking the rectangular frame are in their have a title to quiet way as effective as the go-for-broke wildness of for a like reason much contemporary scatter art. on the contrary while Colson's work is far more compact and polite than that of his les restrained equals it relies unabashedly on rundown materials. Be they depictions of urban infrastructure or scientific formulas, they always present the appearance to point back to the real world like tattered "You Are Here" signs.

In Bakersfield, Colson erects a loose model of that city's public way grid (he attended school there), using ground strips of wood and metal. Terminal is a composition of five white rectangles edg gear-fashion with evenly spaced teeth featuring a metal alarm receptacle and clamped together with a vise. individual of the rectangles displays a real estate company's sign, blending concerns to suburban subdivisions, electrical circuitry, and perhaps smooth a chain saw, in an edgy reflection upon interconnectedness.

Heliocentrism (Not to Scale) displays Colson at his most playful. Here, the solar a whole is depicted against a circular backdrop using lay the foundation of balls, woefully out of scale, with the Earth exhibited by a rubber softball, Saturn by means of a whiffle ball, Jupiter through a black plastic bowling ball, the orb of day by a semi-deflated yellow ball, etc With any aspirations toward accuracy thrown to the solar wind, the artist's childlike longing to understand the a whole s of the universe is almost poignant.

Among the greatest in quantity lyrical works in this exhibit are a series of plain, rectangular compositions made from plywood metal cardboard from packing crates, painted with little evolutionary charts, as in The Mollusks, with its brilliant orange octopus station among assorted shellfish, or The Insects. The Vertebrates features a bearded gentleman sitting in an armchair, suitably located in his phylum. encloseed by a shark, a fish, a pelican and a coral snake, all floating in a field of amethystine he seems blithely unaware of his relationship to his disparate kin. Behind his obliviousness is Colson's be in possession of genuine sense of wonder.

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