David Szafranski at Gray Matters - installation art, Dallas, Texas

To go into this exhibition, viewers walked end an almost uncomfortably narrow space between sum of two units of the artist's "paintings" that hung perpendicular to the walls just inside the gallery entrance. Large fulvous Lawnchair Webbing and Small R Lawnchair Webbing (all works 1993) were made of the titular material woven around 2-inchdeep stretchers. Szafranski placed them too shut to the doors for single to get a good view of them before passing between them. Szafranski likes to manipulate his audience, to give permission to them know he's in charge. on the contrary compared with his last Dallas display when he stood at the door exacting a $2 admission compensation this show began on a gracious note.

Szafranski has worked in materials ranging from dominoes to knotty-pine paneling to Christmas tree flocking, on the other hand his low-tech light sculptures keep to dominate his shows. This time there were sum of two units such pieces. Tall Illumination Device was a tangle of low-wattage scaly buds set like some rare flower atop a 1 O-foot support of metal conduit. stretch outed Heat Lamp Device consisted of ceramic heating coils upon a conduit construction low enough that viewers felt the considerable heat it generated. the pair pieces transformed two of the basic uncompounded bodys of life, heat and light, into mildly threatening at the same time slightly comic forces.

The volume of the show consisted of pieces that fit as awkwardly into the "painting" category as the plastic-webbing works. Ranging in size from a small in number inches to nearly 8 feet square, and for the greatest in quantity part hung traditionally flat upon the walls, these works are woven from admission tickets, explosive strips for a cap fire-arm (bang caps), and videotape. Their unobtrusive craftsmanship combines painstaking labor and the sort of simple pleasure single found in making potholders in grade gymnasium Extra Large Four Color Tickets is an impenetrable wail of admission tickets. Small R Bang Cap Strips was the homely runt of the show, on the contrary it is literally waiting to displode The most gorgeous piece was an enormous black square made of videotape. The teasing title is 24000 Inches of Adult Video, on the other hand the salacious contents of the tapes can sole be imagined: all that can be seen is one's be in possession of reflection in the glossy surface of the piece.

A measure of these works' interest is the near-impossibility of speaking of them without using inadvertent paragrams relating to the "interweaving of surface, support and content" or the "web of formal and narrative concerns" As delicate as the works must be, their woven surfaces appear to have a vigorous elasticity. of the like kind a contradiction is central to Szafranski's interest in demonstrating the fragility of the conventions, social and artistic, that grasp our several worlds together.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group