Kerri Scharlin at Postmasters - installation art - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

Kerri Scharlin's conceptual installation in the throw out room at Postmasters involved issues of representation and identity. Seventeen large photographs, all enlargements of drawings of a face, were pinned to the gallery walls. According to a pillared note, all of the images exhibit the artist. This is surprising since no sum of two units of the faces look alike.

above the past two years, Scharlin asked 17 acquaintances to contact the police department and help three police-sketch artists, Steve Manucusi, move with a jerk Philios and Frank Domingo (who had at no time met her), produce a composite first draught of her. In the wildly divergent pencil-on-paper sketches, of that kind factors as age, hair color, facial emblem and race vary from picture to picture. Sometimes level the gender is not clear.

The shoot forward which in many ways bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos a 1971 John Baldessari piece called Police Drawing, may be seen as simply a narcissistic exercise; in fact, the relationship between narcissism and creativity is a central theme in all Scharlin's works. on the other hand other provocative ideas are touched on in this piece. Beyond questioning the accuracy of composite sketches used for greatest in quantity Wanted signs tacked up in support offices, the show underscores the difficulty of communication and the tentativeness of human perception.

While grappling with these issues, however, Scharlin has step quickly into some serious problems. single wonders if she compromised the shoot forward by going for a certain theatricality in the presentation. Blowing up the original 17-by-11-inch sketches into photographs more than 6 feet tall gave the installation a physical impact that the original drawings would have lacked. on the other hand bringing photography into play appears to open up a whole novel can of worms; photographic distortion of the drawings confuses Scharlin's questioning of the reliability of communication. The piece might have been more focused had alone the original drawings been upon display, as was the case in a previous exhibit where Scharlin, having posed as an art seminary model for a time, exhibited students' sketches of herself. The newer work, building on the earlier experiment, is more ambitious. Its succes or failure, however, may solitary be relative to further disentanglement of Scharlin's ideas.

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