Continuing through October 9, 2010
This two person exhibit of work by Joseph Phillips and Shawn Smith use traditional drafting and sculpting methods to cast a sharp, expert light on the increasing commodification and digitizing of the natural world. Phillips, a master of gouache painting, offers full-color schema depicting combinations of geology and architecture as they might appear in some divine IKEA catalog of utopian real estate: cottages swaddled in vertically arranged beachfront property, subterranean reservoirs of energy topped by tidy storage buildings, discrete units of improbable curbside appeal enhanced by non-indigenous foliage and packaged for some fantasy marketplace. Would you care for a side of julienned tectonic plates with your order, sir?
On the other side of the gallery, Shawn Smith eschews the merely two-dimensional and provides sculptures of wildlife: various birds, the heads of antelopes, a fox. All of these creatures are built from hundreds of hand-cut lengths of wood and rendered as collections of solid pixels, as if the inhabitants of some 8-bit computer game called "Woodland Creatures" had manifested themselves beyond the screen. The effect is consistently gorgeous and jarring and, especially in the case of one piece depicting a vulture perched triumphantly upon the shattered remains of an antique typewriter, more than a little unsettling.
D Berman Gallery
