Thirty years later looking is still an entertaining and almost objectless experience in the new work of Venice artist Angie Bray. Her dramatically long, rotating vertical shafts of thin, colored metal gently spin and bounce, or rub and parry walls, and each other, like elegant lines with wandering ways. Rooted to the ground by their small motors, they reach out to scribe space like blind antenna caught in a gentle vortex and feel around for a way out. Located in the gallery window, they parody and animate the metal architectural details zipping across the building's walls, adding a note of friendly and more humanly-scaled interference to the structure's mass and theatrical darkness. Refined and delicate they manage to exude a certain calm certainty of material opposition as they lightly finger walls or leave gentle rubbed traces over time.
Weeds cracking asphalt have that kind of slow, assertive assurance.
These are Iris computer prints made on his trademark light absorbing black velvet. The seductive illumination of these fragile images quickly pales however, as it bounces off female body parts then loses its touchable thrall in the cool emptiness of a gaze reduced to peep show dimensions. Jennifer Steinkamp's computer generated videos are ordinarily more involving as they splash across architecture in a body absorbing display of dancing color and moving two-dimensional form. But for this exhibition the rolling, coiling computer graphics of Duct are compressed onto a flat panel that seems to float in space. While the shapes of Steinkamp's graphics are obviously keyed to the dynamic architectural area of the building's entrance their projection against the deep space of an innocuous office area suggests an intellectual romancing of space and form missing in real time and space.