Rachel Berwick at Nordanstad - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, June, 1994 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

In her handsome 1993 "Sounding Measures" series, Rachel Berwick presented five large, glowing "rocks" cast of amber only a few million years old, not precious enough to be jewelry. The rocks were placed on pine platforms and wired to ultrasound devices hooked up to a digital display mounted on the wall, which flashed various numbers: soundwave measuements of the volume of a cavity inside each. Berwick had created cavities in the shapes of animal heads by casting the amber over rubber death masks taken from a mountain lion, a bear, a gazelle, a goat and a rhinoceros. The masks themselves had been extracted, leaving spectral negative images inside the translucent blocks. Obvious references were to endangered species, insects in amber, ancient DNA and Jurassic Park, but much more is embedded in Berwick's sculpture.

Each smooth, raw pinewood platform pays subtle homage to its burden, which is the pine's own solidified essence. Usually impeccably crafted, the work is a seamless melding of the technological and the organic. Despite their high-tech hookups, the "Sounding Measures" conjure up medieval alchemy along with the preoccupations of 19th-century naturalists and spiritualists.

Berwick shares with Rebecca Horn the anachronistic but enduring desire to join science, chance and metaphysics. Her past work has involved live moths flickering inside a large, shimmering illuminated sphere of copper screening, and a glass case full of dead, amber-coated moths charged with static electricity. Her moths bring to mind Horn's butterflies, and her repeated use of amber and copper parallels Horn's use of mercury and piles of raw, powdered pigment. Berwick lacks Horn's nervous theatricality and kinetic sexual tension; her work instead has a quieter, more theoretical interest in matters of life, death and technology. She eschews today's pervasive art-world irony and attempts to link past and present in poetically conceptualized sculptural expressions.

Amber Room, a small anteroom installation, was less satisfyingly complete. Walls here were lined with thin, drab amber "panes" in a steel framework, in front of a digital monitor that counted out the ungraspable difference of age between this fossil resin and the more ancient and more precious sort. Like too many young artists today, Berwick tried to convey her meaning via a ponderous accompanying wall text.