Phong Bui at Sarah Bowen

From the beginning of July until the middle of October, the interior of Sarah Bowen Gallery, a two-room space on a quiet street in Williamsburg, was taken over by artist Phong Bui and transformed into a walk-in installation in the tradition of Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau. Because Bui reconfigured his installation in early September, the work actually existed in two distinct states, which were titled Hybrid Carnival for St. Exupery #2 and Hybrid Carnival for St. Exupery #3.

For the first part of the show, the walls of the low-ceilinged space were painted over with an abstract array of large triangular shapes of green, orange, white, red, yellow, pink and black. The black triangles, which accounted for roughly a fifth of the composition, were filled with hundreds of names, each spelled out in letters made from multicolored dots. The names ranged from illustrious painters and writers of the past (Cimabue, Camus) to contributors to and supporters of The Brooklyn Rail, the cultural-political monthly journal that Bui publishes.

In places, open boxlike structures were built out from the wall and slender ropes stretched between points on adjacent walls or to the floor and ceiling. In the second room, several ropes held up a kind of seat or shelf that stretched across one corner of the space. Underneath it was a fluorescent yellow light.

As well as bringing a sculptural element into the work, the ropes and boxy frames (and the shadows they threw) introduced a complex linearity to the fields of color on the walls. A flirtation with perspectival space in the wall paintings also contributed to the spatial confusion.

If this sense of disorientation seemed to correspond to the "carnival" of the title, it was obviously Bui's marriage of painting, sculpture and text that gave the installation its "hybrid" identity. But what was the connection to French author-aviator Antoine de St. Exupery? Once the title started you thinking about flying, the taut ropes began to look like the struts of antique biplanes or kite strings, and the interlocking triangles on the wall came to suggest airplane wings and kites. Finally, the entire installation of precise, colorful forms and painstakingly inscribed names seemed to take on some of St. Ex's lyrical philosophizing and quest for human solidarity.

When he reworked the installation in September, Bui painted over the names, eliminated the boxes and ropes, built new, more solid relief elements and changed most of the colors on the walls. The result was a more painterly installation, with echoes of Dorothea Rockburne and Elizabeth Murray. What stayed the same was the exciting sensation of entering into a vibrant abstract painting, of finding a thoughtful relationship of color and form lying in wait in every direction you looked.

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