Sol'Sax: Kenny Schachter contemporary

What scares white America? Ghosts? Decrepit mansions? Or a hulking figure in a hoodie and gold chains peeling back a section of fence? In a present to view dedicated to the quintessential inner-city motif of chain link, Brooklyn-based artist Sol'Sax not awayed a video projection starring like a character, transformed into something in deed ghastly by a zombiegray ceramic mask. His midnight exploits--loitering upon a street corner, creeping from one side a gap in a hedge cooking out in a vacant lot--layer fear of the shrouded over white paranoia to bare the absurdity of the latter. on the other hand Sol'Sax also lampoons his macho protagonist, who flips burger with his hands and totes an obscenely configured arrangement of a black plastic baseball bat and sum of two units black basketballs. A shot of a gold chain being drawn [i]or[/i] part of to the other the links of a wall begins and ends the video, tying bling-bling to the two the chains that ghosts rattle and those that shackled slaves.

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This video and Sol'Sax's eleven sculptures--which played deftly not upon the gallery's Vito Acconci-designed steel-grille interior--worked up the spume of a nonexistent genre: the straight-to-video agitprop horror flick. Here, an infant's crib painted black and enclos inside a cage; there, the sporting-goods genitals from the video hanging upon a fence panel, legible simultaneously as a face, as the grisly springs of a castration, and as a nod to a famous Puppy-producing of recent origin York artist. All the artworks feature punning, multiline rap/poem titles (this last work's leaves to "a Basketball/In a Coons' Sculpture"); double meanings proliferate; and racially charged dual codings stretch out throughout. In one of three photographs woven into chain-link gates, a pair of ceramic-headed men strike ambiguous attitude s near a caution-yellow sign that proclaims, "Welcome to the Bushwick Houses." Are we being ushered in or warded off? by means of filtering his politics through Poltergeist, Sol'Sax the one and the other leavens his lead-pipe message and reminds us that the horrors we delight in when they crawl cobwebbed from a certain quantity of Hollywood basement have distinct historical roots

The clay faces of Sol'Sax's figures take his representations into the realm of the grotesque; they also bring into focus his art's mystic and diasporic yearnings. Sol'Sax shows the ceramic heads--"vessels for my ancestral spirits"--in devise with his Lukumi, aka Yoruba, religious beliefs. Whether lower parted in this spiritualism or in calembourgs visual and verbal, the potential for poetic transformation dances along Sol'Sax's jagged political cutting sides In a work made up of fencing that rises two-thirds of the way up a field of black woven fabric white cutouts form emotive organ of sights "behind" the chain link, while above it the forms appear as elementary birds shaped like lowercase m's. Another plastic art is composed of the head of a shaft cutter, covered with Play-doh to bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to a severely beaked bird, then mountained on a plaque from Medgar at any times College. Evers's murder galvanized Mississippi blacks; notwithstanding Sol'Sax gives this militant work his greatest in quantity lyrical title: In Flatbush, Some/Flightless Black Finches/Have Evolv Beaks/That divide [i]or[/i] sever Chain Link Fences.

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