Mary Miss at Senior & Shopmaker - New York

Because Mary Miss primarily makes public art, gallery exhibitions of her work are uncommon. This show did not document her public pieces but presented another body of work, based on travel photos. Far from being visual souvenirs of famous sites, however, these photo-collages--which she calls "photo/drawings"--are demonstrations of her fascination with architectural order.

Miss assembles multiple large black-and-white prints, usually focusing on some feature of an antique structure's interior. The photos are overlapped, turned or trimmed to emphasize the unfolding of planes or curved surfaces, and to define an envelope of space. Her interest is always spatial or constructive. The works, which date from 1988 to '96, are untitled but usually numbered. Miss withholds from viewers the specific locations where she took the photos. She's unconcerned with history, local color, politics or other matters that accompany particular places; these works are pure architectural sensation. Yet the different systems of organization and ornamentation arise from various specific cultural traditions, which can sometimes be identified in general terms.

The arrangements are mounted on board, then framed behind glass. A generous band of empty space around the irregular perimeter of the prints allows room for reverie, even as it emphasizes that the specific subject is an excerpt from the larger whole of a building. Untitled No. 19 presented the most restricted space in the show: a small, low-ceilinged room with painted board walls in what might be a very old house. Four horizontally abutted prints capture its boundedness and highlight its angular irregularities. In Untitled No. 16, five prints, both horizontal and vertical in format, depict a wood-roofed stone passage around a cylindrical tower. Peeled logs rise diagonally into darkness as they support the roof. Light pours in from an unseen opening in the distance, and a low doorway is framed by huge stones. This might be a vignette from an ancient world--except for a soda can abandoned on the floor.

Several works focus on domes, one perhaps in a mosque, another perhaps Chinese. An untitled and unnumbered work isolates an elegant, curving staircase with a striking tulip-design rail. The foreground is open and airy, while two more floors can be seen in the upper distance. Here, the photos are angled as if to mimic the vertiginous climb; the view is both spatially disorienting and seemingly endless. Qualities or features repeated in these works--looking upward, circular spaces, passages, light from hidden sources--are engaging in themselves and also for the hints they give about the nuances of Miss's public works.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group