Art Review: Nine artists set 'Adrift'

Courtesy Miranda Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Dee, New York

Miranda Lichten-stein's Floater, 2004C-print 41-by-50 inches

Are we truly adrift? Are all matters and perceptions ephemeral?

The answer to those questions is "Yes," at least in the light of the exhibition "Adrift," displayed in the Hyde Gallery of Memphis College of Art's Nesin Graduate School.

Curated by MCA professor Cynthia Thompson, with her habitual eye tuned to the provocative, the spare and the elegant, "Adrift" cannot help casting viewers into a realm of contemplation and silence such as we observe when confronted by the mysteries of the fleeting nature of life and love, the inevitability of loss and dissolution and the grief attendant upon that knowledge.

Thompson has assembled work by a roster of nine nationally known -- and in the case of Petah Coyne and art super-star Damien Hirst -- internationally known artists who approximate the exhibition's theme in manners that range from the enigmatic to the palpable and sometimes partake of both qualities.

Take, for example, the large, subtly modulated color photograph by Miranda Lichtenstein called "Floater," in which a young woman floats in a bathtub or pool of turquoise water. Alive? Meditating? "Floater" is police parlance for a drowned person, so we could interpret the image as death. The reflection of the woman's head and face is uncommonly clear, as if an alter-ego were gazing into the water's depth. In any case, the aura that the piece projects is of ambivalent tranquility, of stasis beyond time.

Petah Coyne offers two 60-by-40-inch untitled black-and- white silver gelatin prints -- though sub-titled "(Bridal Series)" and "(Susan's Hem") -- presumably taken at a wedding or reception or at least giving that impression. The bottom portions of the filmy, gauzy long white dresses sweep in a blur across the floor. We see no people, just these fragmentary images of light twirling fabric that feel as if they would dissolve if touched. The implication seems to be that relationships, even those ritually celebrated, are as immaterial, as transient, as the dresses Coyne depicts, though typing those words feels as if a burden had been placed upon these works, which function better as talismans of memory and nostalgia.

"Adrift" contains three pieces, cannily positioned on walls across the room from each other, that figure as tours de force of concept and execution.

Two are from the "Romantic Sky in My Own Dirt" series by Markus Hansen; the label description is "dust and varnish on glass." It's almost impossible to fathom how the artist apparently took heaps of dust, scattered them, blew them, coaxed them into suggestions of clouds and then, oh, so carefully, fixed them in place with (spray?) varnish and then mounted and framed them. The result is like looking at vast Midwestern skies trammeled with broad and towering cloud formations, like sepia negatives of Constable's and Tiepolo's skies.

Across the gallery expanse hangs Damien Hirst's "Incorruptible Crown," a 4-by-5-foot exercise in obsessive pattern and repetition. One assumes that no butterflies were harmed in the completion of this piece, which consists of "butterflies and household gloss on canvas," though really what we have are butterfly wings, not the whole insect. Like an example of Victorian decoupage gone postal, "Incorruptible Crown" features hundreds, if not thousands, of gorgeously colored butterfly wings arranged in a dazzling, tightly controlled kaleidoscope of arcs within circles with an X-like shape emerging from the center. Though the flitting, short-lived butterfly has since time immemorial served as a symbol of all that is fleeting and evanescent, here Hirst, creator of himself as a global brand, has stopped time by immuring the butterfly wings in a dense rigid (and weirdly beautiful) panorama of incorruptibility.

The exhibition includes work by Jason Dodge, Janine Antoni, Beth Cavener Stichter, Nils Ericson and Erin Harmon.

"Adrift"

The Hyde Gallery at Memphis College of Art's Nesin Graduate School, 477 S. Main, through Nov. 13. Open noon to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday. Call (901) 272-5100.

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