Lindsay Brant at Haswellediger

Like artists David Altmejd and Liza Lou, Lindsay Brant uses craft to create a certain emotional distance from horrific subject matter. One pauses from the contemplation of mayhem and decapitation to admire the delicate skin of broken eggshells on a severed hand, or red plastic Chinatown beads strung together and arranged to suggest blood spouting from a slashed artery. This disconnect between medium and content is disconcerting. The slow, meditative process of piecing together small objects seems inimical to creating frozen tableaux of graphic, horror-film-style violence.

In the front gallery, visible through windows from the street, a pair of relatively quiet works from 2004 greeted the visitor. Dead Deer is a close-up color photograph of a deer's head resting lifeless on the forest floor, surrounded by wildflowers. Dark Deer is a realistic painting of a live deer in the woods at night. Deer and surroundings are both so murky that the animal might be invisible but for its glowing blue eye. These themes of death and wildness seemed like preparation for the show-stopping works beyond.

Broken to Break (2005) presents a pair of fearsome, life-size wolf-dogs fashioned from papier-mache and painted black. One clenches a severed hand in its jaws while the other rolls on the ground, baring its sharp white plastic teeth. Around the corner from the dogs was an untitled installation (2005) presenting a nude papier-mache figure rising out of a mound of old issues of the New York Times. The figure has apparently just been decapitated, its masklike head placed on the floor a short distance away and bead-blood spewing from its neck. It is in such works that histrionics are countered by the meticulous crafting of the forms.

More understated, and hence ultimately more effective, is a large stained-glass work that was placed at the very back of the gallery, the first in an ongoing series of windows titled "Cathedral to the Ethical Saboteur" (2003). Lit from behind, Window #1: Ploughshares cribs from the familiar Gauguin painting Vision After the Sermon, in which a group of Breton women look on as Jacob wrestles the angel. Here the same women, copied from the painting but rendered in flat shards of black and gray glass, observe a peculiar scene in which distant figures wield mallets and paint red crosses on a long pencil-shaped missile. The imagery raises questions about the fanaticism of faith, the connections between religion and violence, and the sinister side of spiritual visions, lending currency to the work.

This was an uneven but promising New York debut, with Brant's obvious ambition and technical facility boding well for the future.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group