Content provided in partnership with
Judy Pfaff at Ameringer Yohe
Art in America, Nov, 2006 by Nancy Princenthal
Buckets of Rain, the title of Judy Pfaff's recent installation, doesn't just invoke Bob Dylan. It also links an unprepossessing manmade object with turbulent nature, in just the kind of conjunction that powered this teeming show. Because of a quirky gallery configuration, the installation was divided into four parts, the first of which involved two tornado-shaped, plaster-covered forms, one suspended from the ceiling and the other rising from the floor. Their flat circular ends barely missed touching, and the slender synapse between them glowed a mysterious blue (an effect, as it happens, of the Styrofoam left unplastered there).
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Behind this archly imposing dyad was a wildly unruly tangle of tree roots, again half hanging down and half thrust upward. Here the interface between the two was activated by coils of fluorescent light, illuminating an eccentric, tipping horizon line. An association to landscape was supported by the earthy blackness of the bottom half of this element, which included a spill of sludgy, ink-covered foam; above, the roots and branches were painted a ghostly, lightless white, forming a low cloud cover that seemed to bring the ceiling down with it.
If the weather was more threatening around this unstable, swirling mass than at the show's entrance, the storm broke in the following room. There, a pitchblack knot of tree parts, wire, plastic tubing and fiber-optic cable choked the center of the small space, and bilious black clouds spilled inky rivulets down the walls. Though the wall imagery was actually drawn in soot (it was made by lightly torching the walls), the broad-brushed strokes strongly evoked traditional Chinese landscape painting. In fact, Pfaff had recently been to China, not her first trip to Asia, and the region's influence was strongly felt in the sumptuous, heavily layered works on paper also on view.
It would be stretching a metaphor to the breaking point to say that the sun came out in the fourth part of the installation, but the mood certainly lifted there, where a big, cleanly delineated circle, painted in several shades of white against a bright white wall, was sliced by a horizontal burst of variously colored fluorescent tubes, accented with Plexiglas strips in several cheerful shades and lengths of clear plastic screening. Mitigating the thematic tidiness of this finale were narrow strips of tape that ran in even, vertical stripes down the street-facing window, punctuated by intermittent diagonals and suggesting rain as clearly as a woodblock print by Hokusai.
The affectionately nostalgic tone of the installation's title is also applicable to its formal repertory, which--to Pfaff's surprise, she says--includes elements from installations that go back to the beginning of her career. But Buckets of Rain has a distinct personality, and certainly draws more heavily on the natural world (Pfaff's studio is in rural New York) than her last show at this gallery, which was grounded in an architectural vocabulary. In any case, it is not so much the use of signature forms and materials as the abundantly evident spontaneity that, here as always, is the key characteristic of Pfaff's work--a controlled chaos that is both working method and reigning metaphor.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
