KAREN WILKIN
433
encrusted
Tree of Knowledge,
complete with snake-a sort of enchant–
ing Garden of Eden as costume jewelry.
Everything looked wonderful in Locks's generous, well-proportioned
spaces. But the connections between the works, quite apart from their
putative relationship to "the tipping point," were, to put it delicately,
problematic. A number of works seemed linked by their overt or covert
references to grids, their allusions to "house-ness" or other common
imagery, yet it seemed improbable that you were meant to equate Ena
Swansea's half-glimpsed, conceptually based expanse of branches with
Berlind's ravishing exploration of the nature of vision. Swansea's refer–
ence to landscape seemed a shorthand "sign" for the natural world,
while Berlind appeared to examine how the experience of not-seeing–
encountering the natural world at night and from unexpected view–
points-could be made visible. Similarly, the relationship of Westfall's
severe, invented grid to Berlind's casual network of branches or to Boep–
ple's trued and faired enclosure seemed too superficial to matter. And
while
I'm
carping, the differences between Jennifer Bartlett's engaging
house-shaped relief painting and Boepple's enormous sculpture out–
weighed any apparent likenesses of motif. Where Bartlett exploits the
instant recognition factor of a reductive (and reduced) image of a build–
ing, like a surrogate for the word "house," Boepple encourages slow,
multiple readings of his life-size construction, emphasizing the non–
literal internal relationships of his ambiguous sculpture at the expense
of its likeness to a "real" enterable space. (Let's ignore the implied com–
parison between the Westfall and the sprightly tattersall pattern of the
Bartlett.) But if you forgot about the intended theme,
The Tipping Point
became an interesting, varied cross section of (mostly) current works,
some more surprising than others. Apparently it's not just politics that
makes strange bedfellows.
