| Shirley Tse likes plastic. Be it bubblewrap, plastic
wrap, Styrofoam, or polystyrene, the medium fadcinates her. Two groups
of works at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in the artist’s first solo show
go a long way to explain why. In the North Gallery are large format, glossy color photo souvenirs of a south-western sojourn. Like Eleanor Antin and her famous boots, Tse photographs her bubblewrap sculptures perched on craggy red sandstone or juxtaposed against a backdrop of flat desert mesas. Though signifiers of our contemporary, post-industrial, post-human context, the plastic sculptures nevertheless convey an unmistakably organic, even human presence. The blue of their plastic skins competes (and wins) with the blue of the sky. Their pocked surfaces mimic stone flesh pitted by the forces of erosion. Forms that suggest a crowded city skyline do not stand coldly correct, but sag and wane as if exhausted. Stone, on the other hand, does not flag, but confronts wind, sand and water with an impassive face. What might in theory seem representative of the nature/culture opposition, turns out to be elastic, making it difficult to discern where nature ends and culture begins. In the main gallery, Tse offers work of an entirely different sort that expands upon the preamble of her photographic work. A segmented yet continuous work, Polymathicstyrene (1999-2000) cannot be consumed in a single gaze. Not to be taken in the eye alone, this work demands the involvement of multiple senses. It requires that viewers walk, turn and bend, and that the silence of the gallery be shattered by the hollow sound of their footsteps. In the process of viewing, we become cognizant of time’s passage; we sense our virtual confinement while also experiencing the expansiveness of the space the work proscribes. Displayed flat, waist-high and perpendicular to the wall like a faux Formica countertop (connoting the paradox of industrial and domestic spheres and of mass-production of the homemade), Tse’s polystyrene slabs extrude into the gallery space like the multiple layers of a palimpsest exposed to simultaneous view. In this flattened, stretched out state, the carved plastic sheets form an arena where meetings are played out. In an obliging relationship with postmodernism’s shift from signified to signifier, this material which Norman Bryson notes "passively receives whatever is done to it, without asserting a particular nature of its own…a substance without quality", becomes the receptacle for fabricated collisions, parallels and variations. This simple industrial material yields an array of negative forms and hollowed-out patterns that contain the shape of thought and presence, enabling being from nothingness. Into this yielding yet curiously indestructible surface, Tse excavates forms with router, traditionally a woodworking tool that gouges and exposes to view. In one plastic slab she meticulously records the router, its bits and fittings. With this seemingly incidental gesture she compels the viewer to consider the tool itself: its concurrent association with the handmade and the synthetic as well as the hand/machine conundrum raised by it. A subject of boredom rather than heroism, it nonetheless effectively fleshes out the recurring nature/culture paradox while also reflecting back upon the artist and her process. At other points, similarly purposeful forms alternate between simulating nature and highlighting their distance from it. Both casual and poetic, historic and immediate, this text becomes the trace of an ironically fruitful chronicle of a less exalted kind, one hospitable to rambling and inclusive thought. At once narrative, representational, biographical, reflexive, documentary and conceptual, Polymathicstyrene constitutes a cacophony of incompatible geographies and points of view. Segmented and heterogeneous, this plastic work fakes a history and proposes a structure built of thesis and antithesis. Inasmuch as these qualities make themselves apparent to the viewer, the work functions, though not exclusively, as a visual manifesto of postmodern identity, one that begins and ends with a material prone to paradox, imprecision and instability. |
