ladybug, grass, flowers, college-ruled notebook paper

Result #1

ladybug, grass, flowers, college-ruled notebook paper, two-inch notebooks, and, most recently, the list of colors, shapes, and lettering from the ninth-century-temple paintings in the British Museum collection. The four works in this show, all from 1996, are among those in the run-down Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, the largest in the world, that were originally part of the original collection of hand-carved brocades. After removing the brocades, the Roman showed them to the artist (who, as in the process of making the work, then reassembled and cast the fragments) and concluded that the blossom and petals of the wood had no fruit, which is to say that the wood is not edible. Another brocade was also found in the Metropolitan Museum, and in this case the fruit—or what is left of it—is in a box at the museum.After an intensive research that took three years, the Metropolitan Museum sent back the diaphanous specimen to the US, where it was analyzed and found to be not only edible but also quite valuable. (It was also discovered that the flower had been harvested from the top of a tree.) When the Metropolitan found out that he was dealing with a variety of species, ranging from honeycrisp, rhinoceros, and hydrus to the flowers, botanists were elated. Over the past decade, Pieters has pursued a truly creative and unusual line of inquiry into the history and culture of life, from the origin of the universe through the emergence of life itself.A small hand-carved rug of a wig is decorated with a constellation of small images—a cross, a bee, a starfish—that bear the mark of the artist and his assistants hand. On one wall of the rug are images of flowers, signifying flowers, with their variety and sparer quality.

Result #2

ladybug, grass, flowers, college-ruled notebook paper, all covered with verdigris and several dozens of watercolors—each postcard affair along with two small-format works on paper. Blakes works are full of deceptively simple conventions, but they are as rich with irony and wit as her works on paper are with affect and the bitterest of subtlety. She seems to be saying, Please wait and come back with me!Parkers new series of slats (after finding his first one) is more than a homeopathic remedy for his deteriorating prints; it is a homeopathic medicine, a thickly integrated mixture of placebos and the real thing. In fact, each work in the series is comprised of four distinct, identifiable units, which exhibit little of the rigor mortis or obsessive repetition associated with traditional lithographic methods. For example, each slab features a bee-shaped figure, an eggplant-shaped head, and a pair of eyes. This mix-up of the forms suggests a certain type of infantile innocence, although the yellow color of the bees suggests decay. In one work, a single bee head is a central element, while in another, its two eyes are twisted into a single point. The work seems to confirm a certain dreamy innocence, and contrasts the muted, darker tonalities of the other works. In the most conspicuous of all works, a bee-shaped head is the only thing left standing, while two eyes appear to have been torn from their sockets.The third piece in the series, Lower Body, depicts a male nude whose legs and arms have been slashed open to reveal a giant scorpion, its head facing the viewer. Although a scorpion can only be carried by an adult female, it can devour whole human beings. Lower Body appears to embody the same basic motif: the female nude is both the victim and the be-all-end-all, and the female is both the ideal and the object of sexual desire.

Result #3

, pencil, and duster—have a sad, lived-in quality. The pieces appear, like all the scenes in this show, to have been edited and manipulated with an eye toward the letter. Barretts pictures have a snarl of literality, a weirdly emotional quality, and, of course, a decidedly abstract expression. The last half of his exhibition will remain on view through Sept. 21.

Result #4

ladybug, grass, flowers, college-ruled notebook paper, and dusted-off cardboard. In the center, large blocks of cut paper are soaped up with the same kind of paper towels and brushes commonly used to wipe down a plate of pasta, as if to symbolize the overall dryness of the surface. The most obvious clue to the picture is the title, which makes explicit reference to literary myth: Myth, as a concept, is the building blocks of myth. In the background, a photograph of a guy dressed in black looks almost as if he is a skeleton. The skeletal figure is paired with a photograph of a skeleton in the same outfit, and a photograph of a man in red and yellow speckled with white wasps.A ghostly figure, one can only assume, sits on a rocking chair in the midst of the photo booth. This is an idealized figure, the kind of haunting object that occupies the minds of many a paranormal investigator. But in the middle of the image, a photograph of a man with his arms outstretched looks more like a book—a study of the imagination as well as the body. One can just about make out the jawline of the men legs and the chest of the neck. They both have a downcast look, almost as if they had been frozen, and the images lack the mystery that a true ghost might impart to his image. The silhouette of a shadowy figure in the background is merely suggestive; one can almost make out a slightly twisted arm, a small horn protruding from the lower edge of a huge horn. The hornless man sits as a sickly, frail figure, as if he were more to be feared than loved.The ghostly figures have been nicknamed like such things as victims by the media, and in a kind of popular fiction, the portrayal of the ghostly might be the subject of a story.

Result #5

ladybug, grass, flowers, college-ruled notebook paper, and white-flecked beewbs. On the paintings backs are the stories of flies that carry insecticide-treated pollen through the hive. The call of the bees—anonymous and personal, the same—is the same as that of the poet, who writes by sending messages on a postcard. Thus the apophatic oral history of science is communicated as a poem that unites the interests of scientist with the interests of the mind.Burkhards version is a question of what is a matter of consciousness, a question that the artist will grapple with at some point in the course of the show. As a living body, her works carry within them images of the same subject matter: pollen and bees. In the tableau of the Honeybee, 1992, the bees float on a landscape-looking lake, out of which sprout a flower—the bees flower, of course—which emanates a sterile spray. The bees are literally dead, as are the flowers. Burkhards paintings are dead enough to be reproduced, and as such are not really alive—they are a representation of the dead. The bees are also malevolent and often lifeless. In Soil and the Giant, 1991, a swarm of bees encircled the painting by grasping its perimeter. A woman sits at a table, her back to the painting, her body rendered in this highly textured, almost gelatinous, surface. The bees, in her hands, are instrumental in this representation of the mass and power of nature. The scene is one that Burkhards painting as whole gives to viewers to imagine, to imagine how the world might be. She allows us to imagine how nature might be reified in the world of art.This shift in emphasis is evident in the paintings of Barbara Morgan, who also worked in the same time frame and now works in different mediums.