Isidro Blasco at DCKT Contemporary

Photographic representation of space colludes with sculptural reality in the tough, elegant work of Spanish-born New Yorker Isidro Blasco to form a hybrid with an affinity to architectural models. The artist photographs apartment buildings and streetscapes (including tacky commercial signage and shambling pedestrians) in his Queens neighborhood, taking multiple shots of his subject at various angles but from the same vantage point.

From large, glossy digital color prints he selects segments and mounts them on museum board and plywood. By means of a complex buttressing system, he assembles these panels in bristling high relief, with gaps and overlaps distending and distorting the spatial relationships recorded in the photos. The pictorial dynamism of, for example, Side Building with Hydrant (61 by 58 by 22 inches, all works 2006) results from the contradiction between the racing photographic perspective of the bland brick building and the support's planar physicality. Supposedly, for each assemblage there is one viewpoint from which the structure coheres visually into pictorial seamlessness, but more interesting is the physically discontinuous picture plane's intimation of instability, of dissolving mortar and slipping foundations.

This show, titled "The Middle of the End," consisted largely of portions of a room-filling installation of the same title that was seen last spring at Atlanta's ACA Gallery. Several segments were reworked as individual pieces to hang on the wall; just one retained its original freestanding orientation. Side Building (107 by 120 by 72 inches) consists of views of the same apartment building, tidy but looming. With its stilts, shims and shiny clamps, the back of the piece is as visually engaging as the front. It suggests that behind the poised facade of quotidian city life is a precarious support system, pieced together with whatever scraps are handy.

Blasco is great with interior spaces, as well, as in the smaller Laundry Room with Mirror, wherein overlapping panels add shadows to an already shadowy site. These visual complications to familiar photographic space recall David Hockney's piecemeal depiction and the architectural apparitions in Mary Miss's photo/drawings.

Blasco, unsatisfied by investigation of spatial perception, has lately broadened his thematic scope to address domestic terrorism. He alters some of his photos, digitally splicing in explosions that rip through his sleepy, oblivious enclaves. This addition is a misstep, providing a too-literal narrative explanation for the ruptures in the urban fabric we see in the work, and undermining its otherwise intriguingly understated sense of dread. It is tempting to think that the frontline-is-among-us idea is just not taken far enough, except that Car Bomb, a wall work in which a horrific conflagration fills the left half, is both the most explicit and the least interesting piece in the show. A strength of Blasco's approach has been the emotional restraint behind its formal innovation, conveying not destruction but disorientation, the unsettlingly simultaneous expansion and compression of space that the urban dweller experiences.

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