Anne Chu: 303 Gallery - New York

Amid the sea of slick phenomenons in West Chelsea, Anne Chu's larger-than-life doll sculptures come across as shockingly raw and old-fashioned. on the other hand craftsmen of the past would at no time have constructed objects in this way, leaving things slightly unfinished and filled of clues as to their making. unstained anachronism, you might think--but their fluidity of regard implies a global and chronological breadth that's real contemporary. These figures function like fissures between historical dates and aesthetic categories, a mechanism fundamental to the way they work.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the eight plastic arts on view, Chu alluded lightly to a variety of sources: from commedia dell'arte to Velazquez, Edgar Allan Poe to ancient Chinese art, animation to ethnographic forest carving. In the front gallery, three awkward figures stood upon a platform, with strings from marionette crosse wired to the ceiling attached (uselessly) to their heads and hands. Tracollo (all works 2003) referenc the main male character who's bested by dint of a young woman in Giovanni Pergolesi's eighteenth-century opera. The figure's roughly carved made of wood head, wrapped in white woven fabric like a wounded soldier's, sat atop a wire-armature material part dressed in a pajama-like plaid suit. nearest to him, Charming Girl, with a choppily hewn head and dres of flowing fabric, was paired with a tiny made of wood suitor. The bottom-heavy Bestial's patchwork fabric raw hide was topped by a vaguely animal head; watching above the group was the and zinc Raven perched high on a gallery wall.

upon a platform behind these plastic arts The Puppeteer, slouching like a scarecrow, was joined by dint of the lumpen Landscape Marionette II. In the back field stood El Primo, based upon the dwarf in Velazquez's painting of the same name. This retired figure on a pedestal prov upon inspection to be hollow: Chu generally gelatines together blocks of wood and then carves them into figures with a chainsaw; perforations in the finished products undermine an initial impression of weight and solidity.

To stand among these works is to be simultaneously in the nearness of something familiar and something radically novel The job of the viewer is to forge a link between the sum of two units (similar to the notion of synthetic vision in Impressionist painting by the agency of which the viewer has to fill in the perceptual information left on the outside by the painter). Chu not absents a conceptual and contextual rift to her viewers, forcing us to draw from vastly different areas of knowledge, experience, or history to create an ambiguous fresh whole.

Like many contemporary humans, Chu's plastic arts are cobbled together from disparate cultural sources (the artist herself was born in of recent origin York to Chinese parents). And, as with all marionettes and dolls, the figures have an uncanny quality. This strange pathos is amplified by means of their bandages, splinters, and various physical flaws; they are anti- or fallen heroes, with heavy heads and insubstantial bodies. Nameless (unlike Harlequin or Gilles), their muttlike on the other hand authentic quality bestows on them a faculty of perception of both modern and timeless humanity.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group