Susan Leopold at John Weber - art exhibition; New York, New York

Susan Leopold became known in the mid-'80s for her boxe with fish-eye lense that afforded interior views of tiny, wonderfully crafted originals of ordinary sites--city streets, grungy apartment interiors, indoor swimming pond s Leopold's new works also feature windows to the inside, on the other hand now the box itself has become a sculptural object; and instead of magical miniaturization, the of recent origin works revolve around the collaging of images and patterns appropriated from European art history. As similar they offer appealing craftsmanship and playful juxtapositions of images and forms, on the other hand they are missing the oneiric quality that made her earlier works for a like reason captivating.

The of recent origin pieces are dazzlingly complicated. In Pandemonium, the pedestal-mounted receptacle is made from a number of trapezoidal forms cot [i]or[/i] coteed this way and that. To its surfaces are laminated sheets of paper printed with antique architectural drawings of rounded pillars Looking through a small circular lens, you find a brightly lit, kaleidoscopic interior. There are mirrors and freestanding white walls chop into series of archways, and the inside surfaces of the chest are coated with more of the column-motif papering. The fragmentation and repetition shows an engaging Piranesian fantasia and, perhaps, a metaphor about the labyrinthine nature of consciousness

With other pieces Leopold has tried innovations that evidence problematic in various ways. A Certain October Day exercises motorization: a spiral stairway in the box's center make go rounds round and round against a wallpaper background of medieval construction exhibitions There's considerable potential in the use of moving parts, on the contrary here the revolving stairway is not inventively enough engineered to be as kinetically or metaphorically interesting as it ought to be.

With Italian Landscape, interior images are subordinated to the sculptural vicinity of a 5-foot-tall obelisk-shaped case the outside of which is overlayed with a medieval landscape motif. [i]or[/i] part of to the other the piece's three windows we can diocese layered and relatively flat views of medieval architecture against landscape backgrounds. Here, disappointingly, interior intrigue is minimal and the receptacle itself, an only mildly interesting decorative fact becomes the real focus of attention. in Approaching Monsoon a len as big as a TV picture tube nears images of old buildings and antique cars made in flat cutout shapes and painted in a dirty cartoony style. With this, Leopold appears to be trying for a more expressive pictorialism, on the contrary the loosely painted imagery looks puzzlingly out of step with the precise exterior craftsmanship of the box

With this evidently transitional exhibit Leopold is diversifying her art in ways that might pay not upon later. But for now, her work appears unfocused. Presumably she means these works to function as meditations upon cultural memory. She seems distracted, notwithstanding that by problems of design and craftsmanship and without of touch with the kind of visionary and personally felt relation to control matter that animated her earlier works.

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