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Art in America, Nov, 2006 by Stephanie Cash
Since receiving her MFA in 1998, Linda Ganjian hasn't accumulated a large body of work. That's because each of her tabletop sculptures is labor-intensive and can take well over a year to complete.
Her sculptures are often based on Persian rugs. The decorative motifs, borders and central medallion are composed of hundreds of various parts, ranging from tiny balls to "trees" or "buildings" about 6 inches tall. Ganjian makes them of low-fire polymer clay, using cookie cutters, pasta makers or small objects such as buttons, hardware and small toys as molds or texturizers. She then bakes the forms and sprays them with acrylic varnish. Each work is an arrangement of hundreds of miniature sculptures. With its fanciful abstract elements that suggest futuristic cities and landscapes, her work shares an affinity with the geographically specific installations of Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez, though Ganjian strives instead for a more general visual impression of a place.
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On view in Ganjian's first solo show was the 6-by-66-by-48 inch L.I.C. (Lovely Infrastructure Capriccio), whose initials could also stand for Long Island City, the somewhat gritty Queens neighborhood where her studio is located. The components are assembled to suggest a cosmopolitan core, with high-rises and billboards encircled by elevated highways and subway tracks dotted with trains and cars. Parks filled with little palm trees surround the city, and what could be suburban office complexes or sewage treatment facilities anchor the work's four corners. Scattered about are conical and round-topped towers that resemble communication structures or water towers. According to Ganjian, the color scheme--mostly red, orange and yellow against a deep blue ground--is intended to evoke electric lights against a night sky. Compared to earlier works using velvet or a white pile rug as their supports--as in It Must Have Been a Happy Time, which was included in the Brooklyn Museum's "Open House: Working in Brooklyn" in 2004--L.I.C. takes blue-painted ply wood as its support, a minor detraction from the work's overall elegance.
Also on view were seven small mixed-medium drawings on Mylar in which brightly colored shapes, both geometric and organic, float and intermingle on stark white backgrounds. They variously read as circuitry, engineering diagrams and details of patterned rugs. Though a loose connection can be made between Ganjian's drawings and her sculpture, she is clearly at her best and most imaginative in constructing her mini-metropolises.
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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
