Carol Szymanski at Elga Wimmer - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Oct, 1995 by Richard Kalina

Musical instruments are often lovely things, but their visual charm seems secondary to their function. A Stradivarius may be a beautiful object, but it is the quality of its sound that counts. In her exhibition titled "Minimal Pairs," Carol Szymanski has created--with the help of professional instrument makers--musical instruments that while working perfectly well as sound producers are also artistic meditations on form and language.

Szymanski's valveless brass horns and the handsome charcoal drawings associated with them combine shapes inspired by the symbols of the Universal Phonetic Alphabet. These phonetic characters, many taken from the standard Roman alphabet, can be used to transcribe any language. For each sculpture or drawing, Szymanski uses three phonetic symbols to represent a word. She presents these words in pairs: "His" (phonetically spelled "hiz") and "whose" (huz); "white" (wit) and "what" (wot); or "vase" (voz) and "pause" (poz). These combinations illustrate the minimal pairs test in linguistics: can a change in a single sound in a word alter its meaning? If it can, that sound is a true phoneme, the smallest unit of linguistic significance. This sounds like rather dry stuff, but Szymanski's work is anything but. When made into sculpture, with each letter acting as a pivot in space, the words are there, but they're something to be teased out of a playful and complex three-dimensional form.

The process Szymanski uses generates considerable variety. Pairing the works as she does sets up a rational system of order and comparison nicely at odds with her quirky visual sensibility. The knotted-looking, two-belled "How" (Hau), for example, feels entirely different than "Sow" (Sau), with its snaky curves and upraised head. The horns also have different finishes--some pairs are unadorned brass, while others have nickel, gold or silver plating.

Szymanski installed her modestly sized instruments on pedestals painted in subtle pastel colors. (The colors are taken from medieval Indian Mughal paintings, which are notable for their complex chromatic interactions between metal leaf and pigment.) In this show, the color of the pedestals was reflected up onto the metal, adding another layer of visual complexity. In addition, the long wall of the gallery was painted a tart yellow-green, a color that seemed the equivalent of a high, clear trumpet tone.

Much is going on here. Szymanski is dealing with a complex interplay among words, music and sculpture. She is engaged in a process of translation, but the relationships she is dealing with are slippery indeed. It is to her credit that she has resisted the trap of over-conceptualization and has made works that are as elegant and witty as they are intelligent.