Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam at Gallery 16 - San Francisco

Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam are both consummate multitaskers of the kind that are ascendant in today's art world. In addition to teaching full time and maintaining independent studio practices, each regularly contributes to art magazines while sharing the curatorial management of The Suburban, an alternative exhibition space adjacent to their home in Oak Park, III. Recently, they (with their teenage sons Peter and Oliver) founded the "Oak Park Family Works," a collaborative entity devoted to particularizing and re-presenting selected articles (i.e., a video documenting a glass-blowing outing, the bottom of an egg carton containing tiny household items) gleaned from their family life. These are then deployed as the reliquary components of quasi-archeological installations, such as the one presented here.

Because the authorship of individual objects was not explicitly indicated on wall labels or in gallery literature, the viewer was prompted to engage the exhibition as a collectively constructed social sculpture, intriguing if somewhat perplexing, comprising wildly disparate fragments. The fact that the totality informed and amplified all of its constituents without subsuming any of them within an overarching theme was the most engaging aspect of this exhibition.

Despite the absence of attributions, those familiar with Grabner's neo-Op, posthypnotic abstractions had little trouble identifying Double Good News (2002) as one of her signature acrylic-on-canvas works. Made up of two almost identical square sections of tiny hand-painted "pixels" gradating from a yellow-orange periphery to a fleshy pink center, this work presided over the entire installation by virtue of its placement, size and remarkable angelic radiance. Its title and doubly concentric configuration together suggest a symbolic correlation with Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's "good breast" principle of generative motherhood.

Echoing Grabner's double image were a pair of gouache-on-paper works titled Cup I and Cup II (both 1999), presumably painted by Killam. These conical swatches of ebullient reds, greens, yellows and blues are configured as little Matissean stacks of upturned cup shapes that are devoid of tangible contents yet full of a happy chromatic energy.

Other elements of the installation presented in pairs included two digital prints of the front of the artists' house at night (one sporting rather creepy Arthur Ollman-type lighting) and two small green paintings of the unsubmerged backs of alligators lurking in swamp water. These latter works introduced a devilish countertheme to the more blissful evocations of the principal components, a suggestion further underscored by an octet of horseshoe crab shells displayed on the gallery's floor. Looking like something out of Jurassic Park, these polymer-sealed shells sounded a sinister note. Nonetheless, they did add an odd surprise to an installation that reminded us--pace Tolstoy--that happy families are always the same in that they recognize and respect each member's unique contributions to the collective weal.

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