Nothing in isolation: mixing architecture and nature in a new installation, Judy Pfaff found order and disorder in both

Judy Pfaff's installations have always danced at the edge of chaos, with their tangled or flowing lines implying rapid and impulsive movement. Along with her drawings, these environments ale also about addition, about layering materials, forms and patterns with an energy that seems ready to burst its bounds.

Her three-part installation this fall at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art in Manhattan was no exception to her preference for visual density. But this time built structure was gaffs central concern, and the work included all unexpected number of straight lines and right-angle relationships. According to gallery information, it was inspired in part by her Victorian horse in upstate New York. Yet, aptly titled Neither Here Nor There, the installation was an archive of architectural details and decorations from many times and cultures. Pfaff's first step may have been within her house, but her next step was out into the world.

Pfaff worked off the architecture of the gallery space, formerly BlumHelman, with the 57th Street windows now opened up. She responded to that natural light by inserting colored panels (giving one section of the installation a decided pink cast), and she dealt with two partial interior walls by cutting sizable openings in them, round in one and rectangular in the other. The largest space offered a straight view from the elevators to the opposite wall; a corner area was defined by the partial walls, and the third section of the room faced the gallery's desk.

She incorporated Victorian denticulated cornices, Mediterranean tile patterns, Asian pagoda plans, two- and three-dimensional grids of various materials that referred to construction framing, 19th-century decorative stenciling, and a Chinese moon gate. The installation consisted of both representations and real things for example, both drawings and related structural fragments.

The pattern of an eight-pointed star, drawn on the wall opposite the elevators, was extended into the third dimension in the form of an amazing metal bar that darted through the largest space, coursing from floor to ceiling like quicksilver, like a mutating CAD program diagram, like a laser show. Within the regions outlined by this continuous bar--which spiraled through space but read as largely horizontal swaths--were suspended turned plaster forms that variously resembled a hanging lamp, a stupa, a minaret, a screw or a column. (They also recalled plaster works with similar forms by Abraham David Christian and Arlene Shechet.)

The installation evoked both Baroque and Indian complexity. The visual overload was not taxing but exhilarating, not jarring but fluid, not overwritten into illegibility as texts can be but elaborated into greater richness as textile patterns can be. The work shouted out horror vacui. Pfaff increased the visual density by looking under surfaces to reveal structures: some metal cornices were peeled away to show their supports diagrammed in wood and blocks of foam. She also upped the intensity by linking the spaces so that nothing could be seen as an isolated unit.

The installation was not restricted to the theme of architecture. Pfaff strikingly inserted natural elements in each of the rooms. In the largest space, a dead pine tree, with stubby branches remaining along one side, stood sentinel near a wall: nature as line. A thick vine followed the tree trunk upward, echoed by a narrower and more rippled metal version. Opposite the gallery desk was an enormous piece of bleached driftwood. Its contours plunged and flowed like an Asian ink painting depicting water, but it evoked a hugely fleshy recumbent body as well: nature as mass. The corner space was occupied by a hanging grid of various materials, amid which were five large dried lotus leaves: nature as fragile, lightweight and once-pliant plane. There was also a multicolor taped grid on the floor, in front of the exploded plan of a pagoda drawn in white on a red wall

The installation recalled Pfaffs installation Round Hole, Square Peg, at Andre Emmerich Gallery in 1997, which included perforated walls, a "river" of suspended metal tubes, clumps of peeled tree branches and the root mass of an over turned tree, creating what Nancy Princenthal called "a scene of considerable visual mayhem" [A.i.A, Oct. '98]. The difference here was the greater rectilinear order and the distinct contrast of natural forms.

The Ameringer & Yohe show included 10 works on paper. The largest, mounted over the desk, measures 54 by 91 inches and relates to the installation. It includes two frames for casting decorative architectural reliefs, as well as punched paper, outlines of cornices and squares of real tin ceiling, all on top of paper printed with an almost obliterated architectural elevation and an image of the dome of the 19th-century Williamsburgh Savings Bank in Brooklyn.

Pfaff, like the Pattern and Decoration artists of the '70s, embraces life in plurality. Like theirs, her work is too excessive to read as simple appreciation. Instead there's a psychological edge, a frantic embrace, as if she's saving, "How can I have it all?"