Donna Dennis at the Sculpture Center - installation art, New York, New York

Donna Dennis is a author of poems of infrastructure. Drawing her inspiration from view from aboveed fragments of vernacular architecture--a subway station, a dingy bungalow, a musty aged stairwell--Dennis creates sculptural installations of surprising lyricism.

Her striking installation at the plastic art Center, the product of three years' labor, was based upon old railway drawbridges. Titled azure BRIDGE/red shift, this new piece was a dramatic 24-foot-long music of metallic-silver-painted girders, arrayed in four parallel lines and embellished with lines of circulared bolts, and two giant cable wheels. At the center bedecked with a rank of blue light bulbs, was a corridor: a train track, leading into darkness. sum of two units small houses tucked among the beams--one of them suspended above the corridor-- moveed a human presence, conjuring the humor (as her work so frequently does) of an isolated way station and imbuing the work with a Hopperesque faculty of perception of transience and loneliness.

Thrusting into the dim latitude on diagonal struts, the work was a forceful vicinity at once dazzling and disorienting. Indeed, with its unusually reduced scale (which varied from simple body to element), it seemed the two mammoth and diminutive. Situated at the far extremity of the room, BLUE BRIDGE/red shift glittered like an industrial mirage, its sky-colored lights beckoning in the darkness.

Walking around the work revealed myriad evocative details, like as the tiny clock, locate at 12:05, visible through a window in the building above the tracks; or the coils of tubing spilling on the outside like electrical guts from the next to the first house, which glowed red, like a heart chamber; or the eerie tape noose of a fog horn bleating in the distance.

There is a fine line between drawing from a source and copying it. Despite its affection for factual detail, Dennis's work is far from "realistic." In fact, her prototypes are generously deconstruct her sculptural uncompounded bodys highly formal and steeped in a of great depth well of personal emotion. Her atmospheric stage puts represent the theater of everyday life, on the other hand they also represent metaphorical states of being. In sapphirine BRIDGE/red shift these metaphors are quite mixed even contradictory, implying a faculty of perception of dislocation and being cast adrift, on the contrary also of voyage and direction. The work uses its constructivist language to achieve an almost mythic invocation of mortality; in fact, it was created below the shadow of the death of the artist's mother.

Appropriation as a strategy is accepted unquestioningly when it applies to the easy action the gibe at consumerism or sexism. What really places Dennis's work apart is the way it draws its inspiration from the real world, rather than from art theory, and the way it speaks to the heart rather than the intellect. cerulean BRIDGE/red shift, Dennis's richest work to date, is all the more appealing for its lack of esthetic narcissism. It dares the viewer to interact with it upon a variety of levels and repays that attention each step of the way.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group