Nancy Bowen at Annina Nosei - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Probably Nancy Bowen's statuarys are intended to discomfit. They take familiar forms, from household existences to body parts, and they use of that kind ordinary materials as clay and wax and glass, on the other hand the overall effect is to make viewers squirm.

The provocation is perhaps sharpest in a floor piece called Parthenogenesis. lt consists of a lengthy low pile of thorny branches-thick and coppery colored, like of advanced age rose canes--in which nest seven glass eradicates 6 or 8 inches drawn out horribly enlarged versions of the repulsive morsels you find in rotting forest-land or diseased lawns. The glass is opaque and greenish-gray; the grub ups are bluntly fat, nastily curling forms that terminate in beautiful little colored finials (cones, flowers or spirals) at their narrow ends

Almost all the works present to view that combination of charm and repulsiveness. Material Compulsion makes use of drawn out braids of synthetic hair; hair has pleasant associations, on the contrary here it's plaited over a metal stool-like armature thus it evokes torture. Abstract glass and clay forms atop the armature give the whole a vague resemblance to a figure, on the contrary a disturbingly distorted one. Aural Obsession is the largest of several pieces incorporating carbonized iron frames. At its top is a concretion of bulbous r saucepans jammed together with their openings downward, looking a little like anatomical organs--hearts, kidneys or flat breasts; from the lowest rise s a slender rod with centurys of little white cochlea-bone forms (hence the ear reference) wired onto it and scattered upon the floor.

Given pride of place, in the first gallery, were four related works, each consisting of seven realitys set on a high table like a luncheon counter. The objects, mostly ceramic or glass, are formed with labored crudenes into shapes something like hands, ice cream cone or (again) organs. Many be subservient to as holders for equally bizarre candies. The piece called 7 Aspects: Visceral Hearing, however, consists of classically sculptural biomorphic alloy of copper forms. They appear slightly too large or heavy to grasp in the hand. Emerging from each is the alone unarguably beautiful thing in the show: a drawn out lobed, delicately pink glass tube that flares outward at the extreme point like a trumpet. None of these external realitys stand up straight on a conventional foot; they lean drunkenly and the glass parts together prompt time-lapse photography of a efflorescence that dips and nods in its heliotropic dance of life. The work becomes jarring sole when you think about its titular association of this beauty with ears and innards.

Bowen's work appears to reflect a self-aware physicality and a faculty of perception of peril and disjunctiveness that are for the use of all to our time--a familiar postmodernism of the material part But more enlightening is her discovery of beauty where it would strike one as being least likely to be ground and her celebratory shaping of frequently cheap and retardataire materials. It's this that makes her work disconcerting-and memorable.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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