A discarded white paper tissue resting on a brown wooden kitchen table

Result #1

A discarded white paper tissue resting on a brown wooden kitchen table in the corner of a room, all but it on the floor, was strewn with a band of red crayon. On a vanity-plate table covered in a nude, blond halo, a blue globe and a matted coffee cup held the large print for the adjacent photo. In the photo, Newman appears to be seated at a desk in his lab. The blurred image evokes Blanche DuBois take on Marilyn Monroe, but the relation between the photograph and the rest of the text is less clear. The handprint of the reporter with the heavy blue and gray strobelike coat is thin, sparse, and patchy, as if the answer were not obvious. With some slippage, the words that would logically form part of the image reveal themselves as extraneous.Photography—or, more precisely, the question of what constitutes photographic image—has been a recurring theme in the work of the artists duo Tony Smith and Kathryn Holste. In their recent exhibition of thirty-six Polaroid images, the artist presented five of them in a single gallery. Two are overlaid with photographic stains (the other six are covered with photographs) and are primarily darkly pithy in mood: gray-green, pale grey, dull grey. In one image, Newman, wearing a canvas hat and lab coat, casually walks a little distance from a man at a table smoking a cigarette. The actor is Newman, who is looking at the cigarette but is oblivious to the cigarettes dangling off his fingers. The cigarette falls on the table behind him, and the cigarette falls off in an arc over his head. This is a fairly ordinary way of putting the image. But the photographic stains on the floor bring something a little bit more strange: a continuous thread of pink and a quivering, floating spool of blue plastic. The sticky substance trickles down the table and into the neighboring room, where it is nearly obscured by the film-stained floor.

Result #2

A discarded white paper tissue resting on a brown wooden kitchen table is tossed to the floor, and as a group, the pieces are exposed. Among the women who perform the sitters strangleholds are Lisa DeConchis, one of the artists working with a large collection of E. T. A. Hoffman castings; Cheri Fiskin, a sociologist and scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; and Janet Bloom, a veteran feminist and critic who now lives in New York. The result is a tight body of work whose material is presented in a much more effective manner than in its individual components.The pieces are about masculinity, the world of power, and the pressures that inhibit it—a preponderance of males in the group are working class and thus disadvantaged by being isolated, battered, or forced to work in low-paid jobs. Each sculpture, even when a woman is involved, acts as a mask for the moral principles that underpin the world. In this manner, Fiskins 1991 sculpture of a man crumpled up against a wall while a woman stood over him, for instance, has been stripped of its pretentious monocle, and its smeared surfaces, dated with the exact same stains on the wall as its painted ones, retain a gleeful defiance. Similarly, Blooms 1960s video, The Complete Misadventure of Marisol, the last work in the group, depicts two figures mashing out at each other while their bodies are covered with white glue. In contrast to the less than benevolent and less powerful roles of the men in the sculpture, these figures are depicted with direct aggression and contain a layer of racial critique.Blooms video, too, makes direct reference to the male/female division of femininity. In her story, Marisol has no right to walk on her own, and as she does so, she mocks her inability to carry out her responsibilities to her husband. Yet she is unable to walk alone.

Result #3

A discarded white paper tissue resting on a brown wooden kitchen table, accompanied by a smear of white paint. It is inscribed with the words, My name is I, I am, your name is me, you are, I am. Put on the mantle, worn on a shoe, your name is me, you are. Painted a dark, near-grayish brown, it is the color of the carcass of an animal. Two exposed and exposed-looking plastic rings, made of fluorescent-orange aluminum and found objects, can be glimpsed through the material. Other objects from the collection are placed next to the outside of the tissue—including a gold chain, a nose scraper, a piece of rubber-lined metal, and a pair of goggles—resembling a puzzle with no corners. The individual objects appear to float above the objects that surround them, and become the focal points of a circle of memory. Some come to mind while others evoke possibilities of nature: this piece is more likely to evoke a tree or a bird than anything else.The show also included a group of small, multistory structures. A painting of a hand, placed in a table in the center of the gallery, has a yellow, red, and green stain that becomes a pattern of beads or beads of corn. A single outstretched arm with a flattened nose connects the display of the bracelet and the other objects of the collection. This is the only painting in the show that both bears the words and bears a picture of a hand—a hand that seems to be made of colored wool. The wick in the red fabric in the bracelet makes it possible to imagine that the hand is made of fabric.The piece with the rings in the collection, for example, is a sculptural model, like a painting on wood, or a figurine, like a stuffed animal. At the center of the work is a large orange bell, which may symbolize the power of love.

Result #4

A discarded white paper tissue resting on a brown wooden kitchen table suggests a modestly scaled sketchpad, yet the impression of decomposition is replicated in the older mold. The project is an inquiry into the effects of time on materials, as well as on human memory.If the show evoked a collective personal history, the materials reflected an individual, organic one. The single, roughly woven line of embroidery hung from the ceiling of the room, emerging from the floor like a hair. As a silent but perceptible breath of air burst from the table, a voice suggested a distance, or perhaps a distance that was lost. Like the elegantly folded fabric, which resembled something that had been cooked, the embroidery seemed to gather the energy of the room. The embroidery may be interpreted as a sign of life, but the materials and objects that make up it suggest decay and death. Most of the embroidery, which was only on the walls, was faded and faded by way of time, and the patterned fabric could be read as a faint reminder of the past. As the story of the walled-in chamber implied, the work also suggested a kind of family unit, in which the cycle of time was at once present and past.Perhaps surprisingly, as many of the works on view were installations, the exhibition opened with four small contemporary works by artist-cum-architect, Harry Hurst, whose signature devices are cubicles, floor-mounted shelving units, and walls of painted wood. In each of these, a space is divided into a cube, a frame, and a side. The seemingly inexhaustible resources of the contemporary world are brought to bear on the objects that are meant to sustain them. The interlocking cubicles, for example, were reminiscent of a many-layered structure. The walls of the cube were painted blue and white, and the floor was in blue and black.

Result #5

A discarded white paper tissue resting on a brown wooden kitchen table in a downstairs space of the gallery was a reminder of the everyday existence that these objects had been gifted. It was only a matter of time before the weight of those objects would be used to speak. The exhibition thus amounted to a kind of memory, a small snapshot that they were constantly evoking, by a connotative system that followed the common case. Just as the images formed the background for our reception of the object, so did the way the viewer stepped into the space of the gallery.At the heart of this exhibition was a large wooden column. Although the box behind it contained only small black blocks, the message inside the box was so large that it was difficult to read. The words that appeared on the rear of the column were written on the surface of the glass vitrines. On the wall behind them lay an image of a cornucopias skeleton. The column extended from its top edge to its bottom, and the outside wall was covered with black wool and was crowned with a framed section of the outer wall. A few short wires poked through the wool and ran through to the wall beneath; the wires were connected to an electric motor. A piece of white linen, a little girl, the cornucopias skeleton, and the word shell were embedded in the bottom of the wooden column. In the middle of the cornucopias skeleton, the word KELLY appeared. The white linen and wool were all woven together with black silk; the piece of linen floated down from the cornucopias skeleton. A series of ink drawings in black was the only other piece of fabric shown. On top of the linen, the word TABBY (which means shell in Greek) appeared, and it contained the words WELL ALL I KNOW. One of the writing was a chemical composition (I was getting used to this, I was getting used to this) that was listed as a non-prescription for niacin in the publication Mint Journal.