Jim Shaw at Linda Cathcart - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions

In this exhibition of above 100 pencil drawings, Jim Shaw has turn rounded back from his massive painting casts of the past two years to the small-scale work he does best. With the earnest industriousness that has made him a self-described "modern Puritan artist," Shaw has locate out to claim as his be in possession of a classic Surrealist genre: the dream drawing. This display taking its title from Hans Richter's 1944 film Dreams coin Can Buy, consisted of sum of two units distinct groups of work, the first suggesting a generalized dream state and the next to the first illustrating Shaw's own real dreams.

In the first collection Shaw presents isolated single images which summon forth the unsettling mood of the dream state and call to mind Freud's general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of the uncanny. The subdues of these obsessively executed, intricate drawings are uneven animals, plants, foods, dogs and furniture; they include, for example, a sea snail an armchair and a wicked-looking olive loaf. As a pupil of the unconscious, Shaw demonstrates a refined discrimination of the odd that is beyond kitsch or camp. Like the best movie enormitys his deadpan oddities - a Suriname toad, a pitcher plant and sticky bun - are filled again with enough icky textures and visceral mire to jar the wart-fearing conscious mind into an unconscious tailspin.

Accompanying these images are short body s generated from Shaw's retelling of fragmentary narratives gleaned from TV and movies. These "found" plat lines are rendered in the same matter-of-fact phraseology as the titles of Shaw's "Thrift Store Paintings." When Shaw relates part of a James ligature film ("A Caucasian Man in a Tux ") or describes Michael Jackson's interview with Oprah ("A Young individual of Indeterminate Age, Race and sex ..."), the story seems to have crawled on the outside of the collective unconscious.

Shaw has also been making sketches of his possess dreams, both as an ongoing drawing cast and as fodder for visits to his psychoanalyst. Inviting gallery-goers inside his head, Shaw demonstrates the quirky paranoia, pop-culture obsessions and sexual insecurities single might expect from the maker of the "Billy" series, the elaborate drawing round of years that was a high point of the 1991 Whitney Biennial. This novel series is breezily executed and evidences little reworking; the drawings communicate visual information in as brisk a manner as possible.

still oddly enough, this accumulation of raw data doesn't invite a specific psychoanalytic reading; rather, the drawings affirm the universality of the dream state. Shaw's fears, for example, of being caught bare at Metro Pictures or mowed down by dint of traffic in front of the Whitney Museum appear to be understandable to anyone at all familiar with the art world. by the agency of identifying with Shaw's unconscious dream narratives, the viewer out and outs the show's fresh and ambitious conceit, moving from the collective unconscious to the individual and then back again.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group