Richard Klein at Caren Golden - New York - art exhibition - Brief Article

In the back gallery, which has the advantage of a wall full of north-facing windows, Richard Klein installed three large wall sculptures constructed of discarded metal-framed eyeglasses and cut-up shotgun barrels. The punning title of the show was "Gunsight." Light glinted off the hundreds of lenses that made up the three forms.

Target Tiffany (2001) is a curving double canopy 20 by 42 by 18 1/2 inches, hung high on the wall. You can duck your head under it and see that a trigger and guard embellish the underside of the seam between the two lobes of this structure. The frames are soldered together in graded sizes, the largest toward the edges, smaller ones toward the center, with the seam surrounded by rings cut from the guns.

Also open at the bottom but too irregular to suggest a canopy is Bifocal (2002), an undulating horizontal shape measuring 13 by 48 by 10 1/2 inches. I took it for a mermaid, her round head to the right, her serrate tail at the left end and the shotgun rings suggesting scales. Others have picked out a wildcat or an attacking snake in those same curves. The third large piece, Phototroph (2001, 39 1/2 by 31 by 13 1/2 inches) takes the form of a round-cornered, rectangular, closed box. The glasses are arranged symmetrically from a central vertical axis. A large silvered-glass bulb protrudes from the box at lower left.

The show also included a row of four small wall cases in which narrow slices from gun barrels impersonate double finger rings in one work or a pair of tiny spectacles in an eyeglass case in another. A trigger assembly is used as one "lens" in a pair of spectacles, and the rounded ring of a baby spoon is also paired with a lens.

Klein's use of these materials can seem gimmicky, like a craft project or a school recycling assignment. But at the same time, the large works are interesting as forms, suggestive of many things (honeycombs and insects' compound eyes among them), and also simply beautiful in the way they catch and refract light from the windows and spots, casting curious and complex nets of shadow and magnified illumination onto the walls. And who could complain of this instance of swords into plow-shares: guns made into evocative and lovely things?

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group