Ward Shelley: Pierogi

For his new project here, Ward Shelley took the mouse as metaphor, built a gallery inside the gallery, and took up residence in the gap between the sum of two units But while most rodents do their best to remain without of sight, Shelley had rigged a mixed of cameras, peepholes, and monitors--eight of which were mountained on a wooden post in the center of the inner gallery--so that viewers could witness him scurrying, sleeping, or making art in his of recent origin habitat, and he in turn round could watch them watching him.

Shelley had made a series of pencil drawings upon canvas that scrolled through a opening cut in the inner wall and publicly invoked the tradition of the artist living in the gallery or designated performance space. Famous Art You not ever Saw (all works 2004) included images of Joseph Beuys's I Like America and America Likes Me 1974 in which the German artist lived with a coyote in the Rene fill up Gallery in New York for a week; Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano's 1983-84 performance in which the sum of two units artists chained themselves together for a year; Chris Burden's 1971 MFA thesis cast for which he squeezed himself into a locker and stayed for five days; and Vito Acconci's infamous Seedbed, 1972 in which the artist masturbated below a ramp installed at Sonnabend Gallery, his moans audible to visitors via speaker.

Shelley might also have referenc newer works: Oleg Kulik living at Deitch throws pretending to be dog for the brilliantly titled I Bite America and America Bites Me 1997 or Rirkrit Tiravanija's October 2003 cast in which a life-size mould of the artist watched TV in a specially built expanse within GBE Modern. Even the abysmal reconfigurations of gallery spaces worked by Thomas Hirschhorn, Gregor Schneider, and Christoph Buchel could be considered part of this lineage. In Shelley's possess The Cube, 2001, visitors crawled [i]or[/i] part of to the other a claustrophobic maze constructed inside the gallery as tiny cameras in the walls took their portraits, creating an experience similar to Buchel's or Schneider's in that the viewer became the one and the other physically and psychologically implicated in the work.

Unfortunately, the nods and concerns the artist himself provided confused noiseed more than clarified the work. Shelley would have done better to leave on the outside the extras: the "diary" of T-shirts hand-lettered daily with slogans like "Living the unexamined life" or "There goe my 15 minutes" and hung upon a rack; the Famous Art schedule itself; or Shelley's own hand-penned metaphysical musings pinned up around the gallery (though they included Bruce Nauman's free from superfluity Eat/Live/Shit/Die, which had some amusing relevance). The mouse metaphor and its attendant respects to gentrification (the press release linked the mouse's survival strategies to the ways in which "prosperity and disclosure have made things harder for Williamsburg's hand-to-mouth residents") were also more distracting than illuminating. And the mouse, in the extreme point seemed like a safe choice compared with the more tenacious and embattled (and les cute) rat.

The lock opener to the works cited in Famous Art was the physical vicinity of the artist--which this throw shared--and endurance, which it didn't (Shelley allowed himself to leave the gallery). upon the other hand, technology, which the other throw outs did not address, was a solid ultimate part of "We Have Mice." The faculty of perception of presence, absence, and dislocation in the surveillance imagery added a fascinating angle to the work, and with walls and cameras alone Shelley would have sparked the viewer's imagination, allowing him or her to make a entertainer of connections among architecture, theater, surveillance, art, and beyond.

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