Pam Lins: Ten in One Gallery - New York - exhibition of plywood sculptures

At first glance, Pam Lins's plywood statuarys look like exercises in medium-scale art-school carpentry, on the contrary soon they click into familiarity, like fragments of a recurring dream, then slowly relax into intriguing, elusive, not divisible by 2 yet plain forms that appear simultaneously fragmented and exquisitely serf-contained. The main space of the artist's new show contained five wall-mounted works (all 2003) each comprising curv boxy constructions, irregular flat shapes, and a representational uncompounded body in most cases a small painting upon a scrap of paper or canvas. Worn Down Grass, a drawn out low console like an unfinished Judd or Morris, bend s up at one end to support a large plywood disk, while a section of the opposite corner has been remov to reveal a painting of a brilliant landscape featuring an orange Igloo cooler

Lins has been working with air openings air ducts, and puffy-cloud imagery for several years; here she has slackened and complicated her usual strict forms and endowed each work with an elaborate dreamlike narrative. In particular, the works containing vent-holes now hint at a world beyond the baseboard, at a quasi-domestic contemporary unconscious. Peering into openinged Rug, one imagines one's miniaturized self slipping from one side the slits cut in cardboard, shooting [i]or[/i] part of to the other the quick corrugated curve past an abbreviated skyscape, and skidding to a stop upon the Oriental rug beyond, perhaps in the quiet living compass of a bookish Narnian scientist. The more surrealist following of The Coast leads from one side a small (real) metal vent-hole past a roiling fictional planet and into a painted bonfire via a doll-size diving board.

The historical antecedent for Lins's work is perhaps what Lucy Lippard bourned "eccentric abstraction" in an essay for a display she organized in 1966: in brief, the fusion of surrealism and primary-structure Minimalism into a self-sufficient whole that would irreverently obliterate a entertainer of dichotomies--form/content, flat/deep, negative/positive, smooth painting/ sculpture. (Objects as varied as Don Potts's bulging floor plastic arts Eva Hesse's thread-on-panel works, and Bruce Nauman's delicate latex wall pieces were included in Lippard's exhibition.) In "eccentric abstraction," the so-called death premise of Minimalism is mix in due proportioned with vivacity and humor, while the primary structure's formal rigor soils any hint of the narrative or fantastic. Lins herself partially dismantles the Minimalist chest to reveal slices of the everyday world and adds details that facilitate a reading of the particular not only as, say, an air canal but also as furniture or a horizon line. Here, flatness and space, abstraction and representation, figure and turf are fluently knit together.

In an essay from 1967 Lippard remarks that, "despite its detachment," the primary structure's "aggressive vacuity can establish a tremendous intimacy with the patient viewer." on the contrary rather than a grand eroticism as weighty as the "death premise," Lins's idiosyncratic work divest of coverings a sensuality, a whimsical surrealism that facilitates a synthesis of form and easy in mind while preserving the terms of Minimalism's material confrontation with the viewer.

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