Bjorn Amelan at Dwight Hackett

Bjorn Amelan's debut show was surprisingly resolved. Drawing on his background designing sets for the Bill T. Jones dance company, he fabricated 22 archaic-looking components--individual and serial pieces--which were presented in a single theatrical installation. And just as the origins of Greek theater lay in religion, so Amelan's dramatic ensemble took on a reverential, sometimes even ritual, aspect.

A wall divided the gallery's antechamber, brightly lit to figure the daylight world, from the larger, darker, dreamlike space where the artist juxtaposed sculptures of stone and metal. A bronze boat in the antechamber reappeared in the second room in the form of several smaller bronze boats, shaped like children's folded-paper constructions and containing stones, fish or men, likewise fashioned in bronze. These vessels were meant to convey beholders symbolically back through time, inviting us to encounter a collection of five "Looking Ladies" (2004), 9-inch stone figurines of earth mothers mounted on slim pedestals (38 to 82 inches high). Each of the primitive-looking Venuses gazed at a raw stone elevated on a nearby pedestal of equal height. Interspersed on the floor were a group of "Seated Stones" (1999-2002), more uncarved rocks cradled in bronze supports.

The show's overarching contrast of daytime and evening was paralleled by other pairs: formed and unformed, culture (bronze) and nature (stone), lightness and gravity. In a world of metamorphosis like Amelan's, however, these polarities are unstable. One "Seated Stone," for instance, suggested a corpulent woman's buttocks. Another blurred the distinction between metal and rock by presenting similar shapes, hues and textures for both components.

A progress could be traced among the works from raw matter ("Seated Stones") to forms seeming to emerge from uncarved shapes (Tweety Bird, 2004), to crudely-carved females ("Looking Ladies"), to an excess of form in Leda (2000), a fantastic welding of erotic body parts, both female and male. The exhibition spanned the formal distance from humble, Wordsworthian "straggling heaps of unhewn stone" to Jessye (2000, 2004), a gold-leafed reliquary with windowlike apertures (69 by 24 by 24 inches).

But progress was simultaneously undone, because the relic housed in Jessye proved to be a stack of ordinary rocks. The contrast between baroque container and common stone was forceful, but Jessye looked too glitzy and drippy, and felt out of sync with the installation's restrained and meditative character.

The ensemble's gently surreal atmosphere nudged the facticity of stone and bronze toward reverie. Nothing could be less precious than Amelan's naked rocks, but the context lent them an aura that is hard to achieve in an ironic or post-ironic world.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group