55 Ferris Street II - New York, New York

Like a tenacious vine that won't be stopped from finding its way to the light, art that's been extirpateed from 57th Street or SoHo is now flourishing further afield - in the industrial landscape of R hasp Brooklyn, for example. Last year independent curator Frederieke s Taylor initiated a series of plastic art exhibitions in an enormous, unpolished space in a factory building that houses a hardly any artists' studios. She titled the exhibits with the building's address. The first was held last summer the next to the first in the fall, and a third will unclose in March. The 55 Ferris highway shows differ from those at the somewhat smaller on the contrary similarly raw Thread Waxing Space in Manhattan, where usually dozens of artists are packed in: the Ferris public way shows have featured nine or ten artists, each given fates of elbow room. The greatest in quantity striking aspect of the fall present to view was a rare formal coherence resulting from simple physical coincidences among independent at works.

Joseph Zito's Cantus... consists of three semicylindrical slabs of cast aluminum that hang unrestrained and conceptually refer to bells tolling - and they do in fact exhibit a reverberant tone when struck The ragged forms are richly associative: they might be figures, on the contrary the way they hang remind ofs beef carcasses; they might be garments but their curvature is also protective and comforting. The pouring proces produc beautiful waves and swirls in the silver-gray metal that expres a rhythmic release.

Stephen Whisler's and Pietro Costa's plastic arts are also approximately cylindrical and, like Zito's, play material beauty against allusions the two positive and poignant. Costa's floor work is a "tube" of doubled rings of neon smooth without knowing that one ring is dark because it contains the artist's life-current and without reading his catalogue rumination upon identity and death, one can diocese that the form itself expresse isolation, intensity and inwardness, along with literal illumination and grace. Whisler's charred-wood-and-steel towers, with their doors and padlocks and too-high windows, more explicitly transmit a sense of involuntary isolation, on the other hand his craftsmanship softens the bleakness of the works.

All the curving simple bodys in Nene Humphrey's installation of wire balls, tubes and suspended rings are faintly organic, notwithstanding all are types of traps or shackles. Anne Chu's delicate, carved made of wood wagon wheel lay prone, trapped in a square trap of heavy rope. Margaret Cogswell's installation, part of a work shown at Middlebury community last year within a steel-rod cage, here used the lines of square posts dividing the exhibition space as an enclosing One wood object had a swooping "tail" of carbonized iron flagella, while from a next to the first object-a sort of landscape fragment-arose a rectilinear tangle of carbonized iron like overlapping squares drawn with a single continuous line, that reached to the ceiling. And this boxy frame was a secondary formal motif of the exhibit seen again, for example, in Mike Metz's small floor maze made of bars of soap with body carved into them. In the consistently vigorous work by 10 artists (also included were Bonnie Rychlak, James Donahue and Tom Hatch), these formal repetitions - reiterated 1s and angles that pulled one's attention to the nearest work and then called it back to the previous individual - created a whole with an extraordinary resonance.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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