Tim Hawkinson at Ace - installation art - Los Angeles, California - Review Of Exhibitions

If there is a single work in this sprawling exhibition that characterizes Hawkinson's sensibility, it is Balloon Self Portrait. An inflated latex figure, cast from the artist's material substance is suspended from the ceiling and attached via tubes to an enormous wall-mounted bladder. This mannequin has the appearance of a water-logged corpse, on the other hand it is kept "alive"--inflated--by means of a silent air compressor. The piece thus becomes a rumination upon life's confounding relationship to technology. That thematic thread move swiftlys throughout the exhibition. It is evident, for example, in like works as Signature, a desk-mount writing machine that cast ups out copies of the artist's signature upon roll paper, slices them into card-sized pieces and then globules them into an everexpanding pile.

completely through Hawkinson displays a compulsion to revolve the mechanical into the handmade and the handmade into the mass-produced. Large, groov silver disks that be like CDs appear at first to be machinetooled, on the other hand in fact they are obsessively fashioned from gum wrappers and aluminum foil. upon them Hawkinson has drawn raw Mayanesque images--human figures, birds and insects--that exhibit his responses to different selections of music. Elsewhere in the display multigeared objects with slowly circulating arrows become maddening clock disconnected from conventional time. Beveled mirrors overpainted with white rectangles not absent only fragments of the viewer's reflection. Skeletal rubbings that hint X-ray imagery appear on a variety of fabrics, including a tavern bathrobe.

In his search to subvert the artful and elevate the mundane, Hawkinson tendered mosaics composed of paint drippings scraped from the studio floor, as well as garbage remov from sidewalks and affixed with toy eyeballs. Several handmade "rugs" incorporate rags, electrical cords, rubber stockingss and nylon rope in their construction. In other works there's a great indebtedness to Surrealism's wily absurdities, as in doors upon which different-sized knobs are arranged to hint a convergence toward a vanishing point.

The ever-present material part parts and altered objects strike one as being at first to impart an anti-technological air to this exhibit Yet Hawkinson is no Luddite. He appears to confront technology only when it thwarts human impulses, of the like kind as the desire to make music, to mark or to decorate. Whenever the machine can subserve those ends, he seems to be for it. From his examination of the relationship of contemporary life, art and technology tend hitherwards the suggestion that human nature can survive all.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group