Where we're going, we don't need roads...

The work of Dannielle Tegeder is thoughtful and visual. She seems to be "mapping" her external world in a genuine way. Her early works (pre-2004/5) are these beautiful "architectural plans" for fantasy, underground cities.

These maps recorded not physical spaces (real or imagined) as much as cultural needs, wants, and dearth. The title of the above work? Community Under Construction w/ Jumbo Love Dot Boiler; Six Safety Vessel Station, Containing Habitats & Rainbow Structures; Five Square Tower High Rises; Dangling Safety Chrysalis; Abandoned Oz City; Side Room w/ Circle Storage. Ink, gouache, acrylic, colored pencil, marker & pastel on paper, 56 x 80 in., 2004.

The city plans engaged with the point where physicality interfaces with societal metaphysicality. That "point" lies in both the spacial and emotional realms- a physical structure which bears emotional burden. Her underground cities live out these fantasies, carefully constructing the appropriate physical structures to dispel fears, promise safety, and provide love.

The trajectory of her work has lead her on this tightrope of the physical/emotional interface. She began to engage with the physical representation of her structures (as installations), which of course departs somewhat from the neutral terrain of the pure fantastical-- how do we trace the emotional lineage of our structures when we are confronted with them as structures?

Her 2006 show at Priska Juschka (and subsequent 2007 work) brought her to a new place: the third dimension. Her physical/ emotional point of interface (as I like to think of it) morphed in three-dimensional drawings of angles, lines, and colors. Her "point" had abstracted. It was as if she had gone deeper into the point of interface, on a cellular level, say, and was now examining the actual thought-molecule of human desire and destruction, encapsulated in the cell before it can be made into a city. Title of a 2007 work? Instructions for Utopian Gray World, Machine & Copper Inner Structure, Ink, dye, pencil, marker, acrylic, gouache on Fabriano Murillo paper, 59 x 82 in., 2007

It is a perfect widening of the lens, or narrowing of it. From the physical community space, emotions registered in space... to the "Instructions" for a Utopia...instructions are the DNA of what is to come, they exist only in thought. In fact, they are thought! I applaud the sincere journey into a realm that could use some mapping.

You can put the cat in the oven...and dream it's a biscuit.

The paintings of Erica Svec are juicy and free, and tantalizing surrealist. She uses imagery, recognizable in form but contextually out-of-place. This contextual ambiguity is different from the language-content ambiguity I so often espouse. The content-content juxtaposition demands consistent language, and the out-of-context ambiguity of two clearly discernible (and utterly exclusive) objects or events.

Are they mutually exclusive? They can be mutually inclusive once divorced from reason and the logic of the outer world. This contextually juxtaposition exists most naturally in our dreams, hence Surrealisms connection with the ream state (and use, vis a vis Jung et al) to explore this terrain.

And what of the consitent language? Erica Svec is inhereting the langauge of painterly abstraction as much as she is the surrealist leanings of Dali and Picabia, and also more recently Elizabeth Murray and others. She paints recognizable objects (here a chair, there a bed) and also paints unclear objects (are those wings? bacon frying?) with a simplicity and certainty that urges us to accept them as objects, doubts begone. Her painting is clear, bright and strong, with a solidity that recalls the great muralists as much well as Matisse. That her language is loose and 'abstract' is true, but I feel her explorations to be in imagery instead of language. Her imagery, bold and out-of-context, is in the small vein of a long, and rational, tradition.

Rekevision

Karlis Rekevics is an artist trying to find meaning in the shapes, forms and motifs of the urban world. He appropriates said elements, repositioned for your own examination. The resultant lines and forms often find a pleasing rhythm, a group of many elements then opening onto a quiet passage. I encourage his quest towards the essential form and function of the world around us.

The Artist as Your Assumptions

Julie Heffernan is at PPOW until October 20, 2007. Her work is delicate and also bulldozing. Heffernan works in the midst of a sea of heavily appropriated imagery, painting in a style we associate with "traditional" portraiture and landscape. However, one quickly sees she is tongue- in-cheek, and the rest of one's viewing is spent putting ones finger on what she is up to.

Truthfully I can't figure her work out. There are 18th/19th century modes (games, morality, hunting, big skirts) contrasted with current issues. "Self Portrait with Men in Hats" surrounds our protagonist with ornaments detailing men in hats-- current men in power, such as our esteemed Leader and his Associates.

Also, the question of the game. Skirts made of freshly dead (not yet stiff) game animals-- deer, hare, pheasant. Another mode of our ornamentation/ vanity/ greed?

Another issue is that of identity. Somewhere in the literature about her work I read the red-haired protagonist is not actually the artist-- the title "Self Portrait as..." is itself a study in identity and assumptions. Role playing. What about questions of veracities in art? What about the metaphor of "self-portraits", of our roles and identities, especially as social construct?

There is a lot of smart in these paintings, and I admire her wit and intellect. I also admire her pairing/ playing language against content, and her explorations of our unexamined assumptions and social identities.

The Organic and The Inorganic

The work of Sarah Lutz and Laura Battle are juxtaposed at Lohin Geduld right now. Sarah Lutz examines the outer vestiges of the organic world: cellular structure, forms dividing upon themselves, the structure which supports all of life. Laura Battle engages with the outer, universal world through the patterns she finds in time and space, relentless marking shifting intervals across broad planes of paper. Her work, at first overwhelming, opens into delicate rhythms which explore the rhythmic cycling of natural phenomena. Two worlds represented: the clean, patterned world of fact, time, interval and geometry, and the fecund divisions of organic matter, confined by gravity to the earth floor, dividing and decaying forever more.