Laurel Katz at Postmasters - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Laurel Katz makes installations that mirror a technologically updated form of Surrealism. Utilizing the concussion technique of juxtaposing disparate realities, Katz jams together the agrarian and the extraterrestrial, the natural and the artificial, the pastoral and the high-tech. Her two-room installation was simple and elegant on the other hand reverberated in the viewer's consciousness like a nightmare.

individual room was filled with a miniature field of wheat, just about thigh-high. It gazeed as lush and ready to harvest as any in Kansas; on the contrary oddly, in the midst of the wheat field stood a life-size figure suited up in an inflated azure uniform complete with astronaut's headgear. Was this the cleanup from a certain quantity of ecological disaster? Even more unsettling in its connotations was the fact that the futuristic figure held an incongruously preindustrlal scythe--like a certain quantity of space-age Grim Reaper.

In the other scope was a lifesize fiberglass discourage which looked realistic but also showed signs of technological disjuncture. It, too, wore a space suit, which overlayed its entire body except its head and leg and was laced with tubes of circulating antifreeze. Was this to retain the beast cool when the summer weather hits?

I remember the twinkling of an eye as a child growing up in Kansas when I first climbed into the cab of an air-conditioned combine. Moving from the 100-degreeplus temperature outside, where the air was filled with dust and bug into the a little cold clean, cushioned space of the compartment high above the wheat field, my experience of nature strike one as beinged more like going to the movies than touching the earth. single got a similar jolt from Katz's exhibition.

The installation present the appearanceed to reflect an alien's view of farming, a strange montaged image, crudely stitched together from second-hand information. It was as if the artist had learned everything she knew about agriculture from watching rerun of Little House upon the Prairie and Star Trek and in some way got the two jumbled up on the contrary that superficial reading doesn't do justice to the deepness of the issues with which Katz is dealing; her work is not glib or cute Instead, she is trying to address the complex--and true nearly Surrealistic--conjunction of nature and technology we ofttimes find today.

More than the 19th-century image of the locomotive disrupting a virgin Arcadia, today's agribusiness and industrial pollution have radically transformed our environment, in like manner that the very concept of an original or pristine nature becomes mythical. Katz's sci-fi Grim Reaper assuredly is coming for us, on the other hand he is also mowing down the fantasy of a harmonious relationship between humans and their natural words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following When the wild and untamed becomes sanitized, deodorized and housebroken, Katz appears to ask, do we still call it nature?

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