St. Louis Art Capsules

Newly Reviewed
Featured Review: A Day Like Any Other This mid-career survey by 42-year-old Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander features a suite of works that function like trenchantly clever pop refrains. The media are wildly diverse — installations, video, drawing, painting — but the constant is a core engine of simple play. In Rain Rains, silver buckets filled with water hang from the ceiling, dripping into buckets placed below. Holes punched from the text of 1001 Arabian Nights are scattered on black pages of paper, creating constellations made to mark every day of the exhibition. A soap bubble is filmed as it eludes bare light bulbs, hallway corners and kitchen cabinets in an empty urban apartment, in a poetical homage to Roman Polanski's paranoiac 1976 film The Tenant. Viewers are invited to make an appointment with a police sketch artist to whom they can describe their first love and have that love rendered, in a piece after Samuel Beckett's early novella First Love. And in Involuntary Sculptures (Speech Acts), the twisted tin labels and paper straw wrappers wadded in the hands of nervous bargoers are displayed in white vitrines. Time, perception and the bare inevitability of gravity, weather and idle hands are the operable mechanics, here, creating an elegantly blithe portrait of the weighty elements that encumber us. Through January 10, 2011, at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Forsyth and Skinker boulevards (on the campus of Washington University); 314-935-4523 or www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. daily (closed Tue., open till 8 p.m. Fri.).

stylus Ann Hamilton's poetic and site-specific installation addresses the history and scope of modes of communication. Upon entering one is invited to choose a record drawn from the St. Louis Public Library that plays in concert with the other-worldy soundtrack (composed by Shahrokh Yadegari) that otherwise consumes the installation. Mumblings of words, some of them discernible, echo through the wide gallery corridors, many of them recited by Hamilton (a printed transcription is available) and integrating words from William James' Varieties of Religious Experience and phrases from contemporary news RSS feeds. The liturgical and the political (or the spiritual and the pragmatic) could be described as the conscience of this exhibition, which envelops you with sound, implicates you with participatory choices and confronts you with engrossing but temporal imagery. In short, Hamilton has created a kind of weather, one whose stormy ruptures and angelic calms are both within viewers' reach to affect, and, simultaneously, to be subjected to. A table covered in jumping beans resides in what becomes the Pulitzer's choir loft, the sound of the beans amplified by microphones that hover above them. Their wordless chatter feels as elemental as the soaring crescendos of a classical soprano voice, which occasionally intervenes in the soundscape. As the signal and noise of today's news streams past, verbally and in visual projection, the viewer is moved to reflect on all that can't be said. Through January 22, 2011 at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, 3716 Washington Boulevard; 314-754-1850 or www.pulitzerarts.org. Hours: noon-5 p.m. Wed., 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat.

Ongoing
Alex Gene Morrison: Black Economy Two small oil paintings by London-based painter Alex Gene Morrison have found a singular venue for intimate scrutiny: a seven-by-seven-by-nine-foot white box in the home of curators Dana Turkovic and Daniel McGrath. In the dining room, to be exact. The experience of the space — a homemade and radically compressed version of a contemporary gallery — is as much of a focal point of the exhibit as the works themselves. An apt analogue for the reductive abstraction depicted in the paintings, the act of considering work in this space is an extreme distillation of what it means to closely observe art: One becomes all too aware of that expectant act of awaiting some kind of revelation or impact. In Alignment a dark pyramidal form rises from the edge of the picture plane, above which a skyline of thick orange paint hangs like a post-nuclear sun; in Slab a brown rectangular hunk sits reticently in shallow space. The two works are, respectively, the ur-forms of the landscape and the still life; protracted inspection reveals their tactile execution — varying brush widths, gradations of gloss, thickness of paint application. The imagery becomes surreal and portentously symbolic, nearing occult signification (a refined version of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album cover; a psychedelic Chardin?). But maybe that's too much observation. Whatever the reality, viewing Black Economy in the "gallery kit" succeeds in applauding visual sophistication and, just as succinctly, indicting it. Through November 9 at Isolation Room/Gallery Kit, 5723 Dewey Avenue; 314-660-6295 or www.gallerykit.blogspot.com. Hours: by appointment.

Elad Lassry: Sum of Limited Views Israeli-born, Los Angeles-based artist Elad Lassry repurposes our collective sense of stock photography to bizarre and uncanny effect, creating still lifes and portraits that straddle popular advertising and surreal conceptualism. With their intimate, domestic scale, the pieces inhabit a snapshot realm even as they swerve away from the familiar. A series of open, pink lipsticks set on small green pedestals are presented against a green background within a green-painted frame. A well-groomed young man with a large white smile appears poised for product placement, but the image is double-exposed, giving him four eyes. The works appear simultaneously static and shaken — or on the verge of some subtle movement — an effect Lassry explores further in a series of sixteen-millimeter films. Also showing — Richard Artschwager: Hair A former furniture maker, Artschwager has employed rubberized horsehair of the type used in upholstery to create works that exist in a realm of inconclusiveness like that of Lassry's photos, where hard lines of exclamation points, thrones, tables and figural silhouettes blur in the frayed surface of their hirsute material. These pieces, made over the past three decades and rarely exhibited, expose a new dimension of this elusive artist's large and varied canon: an effort to soften the cerebral nature of the principal mid-century art movements. Through January 2, 2011, at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 3750 Washington Boulevard; 314-535-4660 or www.contemporarystl.org. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sun.