Ashley Bickerton at Sonnabend - sculpture - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

Ashley Bickerton gave his of recent origin body of work the title "Just Another Shitty Day in Paradise (A Travelogue)." Flight from Borneo to Sulawesi has the same slick, packaged direct the eye that has been a feature of his statuary since the mid-'80s. The nine squares of Hydrostone and resin which make up this piece connote in a campy way a certain quantity of underwater environment, an imitation coral take in which actually comes close to looking like the real thing. While Bickerton's work has always taken swipes at the tillage of capitalism, especially as it has scarred and erod nature, individual gets the feeling he has been totally seduc through the illusionary aspects of his phony materials.

The work in this exhibition operates end humor (or sarcasm) and by means of stylistic devices such as the double entendre In Self-Portrait: Kelapa-kepala, a turquoise rubber head (a self-portrait of the artist) with human hair braided into three palm tree has been mountained on an upright steel twig along with an orange Hydrocal Buddha and a coconut Bickerton has cast himself as a goofy ludicrous totem with a self-deprecating smile and clos organ of visions who has achieved some state of bliss, natural high or nirvana. The work is, of course, a quibble which plays on the emptiness and spiritual vacuity of consumerism. For all its tinsel surfaces and overproduced parts (the works here were made to order and incorporate, with small in number exceptions, no sculpted or smooth found objects), this self-portrait ironically foregrounds the character of a cultural condition rather than the artist's have a title to interiority.

But aspects of Bickerton's have biography are embedded in the works. That he was born in Barbados, grew up in Hawaii, and went to corporation in southern California--areas in which tourism and popular tillage have made glaring intrusions upon nature--partly explains his preoccupation with ecological issues. The bizarre dislocation of a work of the like kind as Double Manta, in which sum of two units menacing plastic fishlike forms are joined by the agency of a painted fabric harness and suspended from the ceiling, is evocative of a certain number of memory (or nightmare) now transformed into metaphor. The same kind of recontextualization informs Solomon Island Shark, in which a life-size rubber shark embellished with coconut and bags of dusky liquid hangs from a fasten There is something quite outlandish and surreal about these sculptural works, the two in their juxtaposition of quirky, absurd realitys and in their representation of a society whose desire for material things has become lopsided and ridiculous. Bickerton's work does not present any answers or any way on the outside of this imbalance. Instead, he is a awry dispassionate and somewhat accepting on-looker of the commodities that have replaced nature.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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