Synthetics

Sadly, Terri Friedman’s “Falling Up” exhibit at Shoshana Wayne features only one (albeit gigantic) example of the artist‘s awkward, anthropomorphic kinetic inflatables. Fly Naked’s rickety 2-by-4 structure teeters 17 feet toward the ceiling of the large gallery, anchoring assorted tumorous windsocks, collapsing and re-inflating in some vaguely organic rhythm. As in Duffy‘s work, the grafting of a pathetic anthropomorphism on the plastic inflatable -- a medium which, in the early ’70s, symbolized (and for some artists still does symbolize) the pristine evacuation of the human touch from art making -- provides a welcome depth to the glut of superficial ‘60s modernist appropriation that passes for art-historical engagement these days. Apart from a mysterious giant aluminum bowl, the rest of Friedman’s show treads dangerously close to such easy decorative flatness, with layered, translucent poured-acrylic paintings on plexiglass, like lovely stained-glass versions of Morris Louis -- beautiful to behold, but not too challenging.

The companion exhibits to both Duffy and Friedman are also curiously related. Phil Argent, at Shoshana Wayne, is easily the most interesting of the abstract painters to emerge from the graduate program at UNLV led by Dave “Genius” Hickey. Stephen Heer, in the front space at Vielmetter Projects, studied under Argent at UC Santa Barbara and navigates the same Web-influenced aesthetic terrain. Both artists overlay carefully drafted elements that recall electronics diagrams, industrial machinery and the negative spaces of manufactured plastic goods. Both address the flatness of their sources by inserting carefully orchestrated passages of texture, a la Lari Pittman‘s candle drips. While I’d like to see something in either artist‘s oeuvre get a little out of control, both proffer substantial visual pleasure. Design-wise, it’s pretty much a toss-up between the two -- Heer‘s embossed biscuit-tin grounds and card-table corners have a retro sci-fi charm, and his murky ruby-colored oil-paint lozenges seem like portholes into abysmal depths. But in the end, I think I’d lean toward Argent‘s work, with its hedonistic inclusion of diamond dust and curiously stripped-down evocation of decorative excess. Argent’s paintings have always possessed an admirable compositional complexity, but his pictures have gotten less cluttered over the last couple of years, allowing new, subtle plays on continuous pictorial depth to emerge from what had been the entertaining, but less painterly, jostlings of geometrical fops in Edwin A. Abbott‘s Flatland.