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Leopards in the Temple
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Monday, November 5, 2007
“Reconfigured”: The state of contemporary art on view at the Basement Gallery’s national exhibition

Basement Gallery curator Michael Martin thought the odds were high that something good would happen if he organized a national, juried exhibition whose title and theme exploits both the historical importance and the expressive richness of the term “Reconfigured.” And leaving it up to “each artist to interpret what they think or feel the exhibition title means to them specifically” has enabled Martin to present a cohesive yet highly diverse exhibition that provides a revealing snapshot of contemporary art which is greatly enhanced by the oil paintings by Mandy Rogers Horton and the installation/sculpture by Tina Stevens.

Horton’s two paintings have the power to create a newly fashioned historical tradition that seems to turn certain works from the past into her own precursors. That is, movements, media, styles and eras not normally associated with one another like the Medieval Fresco, Pointillism, Surrealism and the late works of Francis Bacon converge as if in response to a summons issued by Horton’s “The Soft Animal of Your Body” and “In Search of.”

In both of these works, which seem to demand that they be viewed together, merging, bleached color patterns tainted by a single hue appear to outline the haunting remains of a sacred fresco. The unaccountable white background against which figures neither wholly abstract nor wholly representational appear in a state of suspension heightens our sense of having discovered a precious fragment that belongs to a vanished world. Along with this feeling of loss and unfamiliarity, however, the works seem to generate a quiet, dynamic energy that is derived from multiple sources. In fact, the longer we look at the paintings, the more we may start to detect signs of a violent and painful metamorphosis that appears to have been frozen at a decisive, and yet still indeterminate, moment. But it would perhaps be more in the spirit of Horton’s work to say that what we see depicted is the actual freezing of a crucial point in a struggle which somehow appears to be taking place simultaneously between two clashing life-forms and within a single “organism.”


This sense of bearing witness to an act of “reconfiguration” may give viewers the feeling that they are also engaged in a type of struggle, as their perceptions of the paintings’ figurative qualities repeatedly come up against the limits imposed by the abstract forms which continually threaten to engulf the painting. This shift from the figurative to the abstract is then reinforced and deepened when, as though in response to the gravitational pull of two opposing magnetic forces, we alternatively step away from, and toward, the works.

What may initially strike us most about Tina Stevens’ untitled installation on view is how “easy” it is to identify the form and content of the sculpture—especially since they seem to be one and the same: an arrangement of about 2 dozen screwdrivers with red handles on a white pedestal that is raised a couple of feet off the ground. But this feeling of recognition proves to be short-lived as we perceive how all the tools seem to be inexplicably interwoven with one another. And upon closer examination we also see that the shaft of each screwdriver has been bent in a manner that transforms the tool into a “new”, hook-like instrument. As a result, the misshapen, “melted” screwdrivers that nevertheless also appear unused, undamaged and oddly “functional” (even if no exact function for them comes readily to mind) seem to have magically shed their functional properties and taken on strikingly “aesthetic” features.

Stevens’ arrangement thus creates an effect similar to the one produced by Horton’s paintings in that she allows us to envision a process of visual alteration that normally occurs only on a computer screen. And so before long the scrap heap may begin to resemble by turns a Frank Gehry-like architectural model, a newly invented technological device, and the exposed, internal wiring of some mechanized apparatus.

But the works by Stevens and Horton do more than “stage” a moment of reconfiguration that points toward, and further develops, the history of modern art. They also suggest that a revitalized way of seeing should not restrict its field of vision to the realm of art.