L.C. Armstrong at John Post Lee - painting and sculpture - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

Nothing is explicit in LC Armstrong's paintings and plastic arts where suspicious objects and marks simply suggest the residue of violent facts Even where the materials are quite literally explosive--bullets, bomb fuses--they have been subsum within rather cold formal concerns. Armstrong knows that in order to join back to the suffering material part the evidence must come as a surprise. A clod of raking rectangles in gold white and gray, looking like a '50 linoleum kitchen floor (Autumn in novel York), has been shot at with bullet a certain number of of which remain embedded in star-shaped apertures Look carefully, the artist refer tos in Faux Pas, and you will find traces of misdeeds: droplet of down-reaching red, for example, splattered near a collaged bathroom drain. Bullet details of domestic interiors and stains become ball of threads to an irrecoupable narrative caught within transparent resin surfaces.

Faux Pas has been trodden on by the artist's paint-soaked solitarys and splashed by the artist's coffee She is everywhere restlessly implicated, and she brings the viewer along for the indictment. At the center near the drain, is a sheet of carbon paper. If I stand just in the way that my face is reflected in the dark amethystine further embedding subjectivity in this already intensely personal work. The glassy surface, however, along with a wintry palette and an overall formal rigor, appear to bes to place feelings at a carry "Without being silent, I was elsewhere," writes Genet Emotional disassociation prevails, flat as witnessing is unavoidable.

Armstrong is freshening the tasks of abstraction, like a number of other painters who showed last season (Cora Cohen, Byron Kim, etc) From a distance, the delicate silver bights in Autumn in New York play Pollock; the indigo carbon paper of Double Take, Reinhardt. It doesn't always work. Double Take, with six lines of eight sheets of carbon paper, proffers a shifting, liquid grid inside the resin, on the other hand lacks the visceral impact of other paintings. [i]or[/i] part of to the other her bodily habitation of abstraction Armstrong challenges modernism, smooth as she fashions a not unadmiring continuity. Broadway Doggie Woggie's brown-smeared surface doubles as Ab-Ex homage and, you judge at randomed it, New York's summer pavements. Armstrong displays some ambivalence toward her admitted inheritance.

Armstrong has been as a great deal of shown as a sculptor as a painter in her relatively of recent origin career. Dead Lock is a wheeled aluminum dolly carrying sum of two units stacks of latex sheets striped like notepads and tied down by dint of two stockings, one black and single beige. Armstrong used the lined latex sheets in a number of previous works (Leda, Seven Times Seventy) They have feeling like skin, suggesting a passive material part awaiting its inscription in language. The knotted stockings intimate sadomasochism. Her "Road Scribbles" are retreads cast in alloy of copper and subtitled for the location where they were found--Pulaski Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge. Funnier than the other work, their wit is nonetheless hedged through fatalism.

Armstrong is too savvy to take a literal road as she eschews the sensational tactics of other contemporary artists who address issues of violence and the material part (Kiki Smith, for example). Instead, her work maintains that the unspeakable is not representable, at least no directly, and that abstraction, one time ladled with content, can be under the orders of up a powerful testimony.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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