This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: August 2, 2008 - Exposure 11 at UMSL’s Gallery 210 features St. Louis mainstays Andrew Millner and Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, plus the relative newcomer Snail Scott, in a spare, cohesive show that will leave you wanting to see more from each artist. (That, presumably, is how the Exposure series is supposed to work.)
Millner continues his ongoing digital drawing enterprise, this time tracing images of cacti with an electronic pen, overlaying the images, and printing them out in line qualities and inks that could easily be mistaken for ballpoint pen or felt-tip markings.
The two large “Cribbed Cacti” (2008) on display here are astonishing. Some of the cacti are rendered as if by a nervous hand. Those give way to more confident, CAD-like drawings. And then the whole thing culminates in an impossibly dense mesh whose subject and source is beyond recognition.
Lahs-Gonzales has made some fine, crystalline webs of poured plastic and paired them up with bundles of dried grasses and leaves. This small, untitled work starts to engage the dialectics of “nature” and “artifice,” but Lahs-Gonzales really goes to work on this issue in her large photographs, strange close-ups of branches and foliage.
A digital video entitled “October” only compounds the problem, as its images refuse clear readings, and the nature of the subject stays stubbornly at bay.
Seeing is likewise rendered problematic in Scott’s “Span” (2008), a construction of blue-colored building components — a leaning tower, two I-beams — that hangs improbably in mid-air. The whole thing’s a sculptural trompe l’oeil, exploiting our tendency to use vision to read weight.
Details
Through September 20, 2008
Exposure 11
Gallery 210 at the University of Missouri-St. Louis
44 East Drive, TCC
One University Blvd.
314-516-5976