Lisa Hoke at Horodner Romley - mixed media - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

Where one time Hoke made work of fruits and vegetables cast in iron and cantilevered or suspended in commanding, gravity-defying gesturings she is now dealing in the particulars of domestic life. Two of the pieces in this present to view begin with shower curtains, a r plastic individual in Red Sky and a zebrastriped number in dip Both are cut vertically into regular strips, between which are sewn double thicknesses of tulle filled with assorted buttons. The materialed strips extend past the bottom cutting side of the curtain down to the floor, where they extreme point in snaky, button-filled tangles.

Like Hoke's novel Interlocking Parallels (on view concurrently at Exit Art), made of centurys of zippers sewn together to form a dazzlingly unstable tapestry, the shower-curtain works examine open a simple, painterly plane and make it sculptural. It may be more than an incidental conceit that these are curtain-wall forms a term introduced in architecture to describe what happened to exterior walls when they no longer urgencyed to be load-bearing. In fact, all of Hoke's work can be said to involve pulling apart the fabric of conventional form and reassembling it in ways in which the aged structural laws don't quite apply.

What now challenges these conventions is the emotional weight of the percepts Hoke is using, rather than the balancing feats of her early work. on the contrary while her bath accessories and petticoat material can be measured by the agency of their expressive valences, they are not lay together for narrative or polemical coherence. They are used instead to skew the perceptual experience of the work. This skew takes literal form in jaws to Mouth, an uneasily inclined plane made of button-filled baby-food jars that are joined side-to-side with wax. It is an iconic image of the daily diligence required to food a growing body, evoked by dint of the work's precarious attitude, its weight and fragility, and the cataclysm of buttons it gripe [i]or[/i] grips at bay. Similarly, Lifeline, a rounded pillar made from a medley of unmatched shirtsleeves waxed stiff, can be read as an lyric poem to the simple, intensive labor involved in almost any kind of creative work. on the contrary this sculpture, too, works primarily through reconfiguring the space around it, offering a means of ascent that is as structurally weak as it is pictorially robust.

A renewed focus upon the objects and chores of domestic life--washing, sewing, feeding--was a signal feminist contribution to the art of the mid-'70s. In Hoke's of recent origin work, that legacy is implicit, flat if the physicality of her plastic art is defined by more than gender

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group