Jocelyn Shipley's show "The Secret Life of Sculpture" up through July 5th at Canada Gallery on Chrystie Street (one of the smartest galleries around) left me feeling loose, giddy, and as if while walking through Chinatown afterwards was akin to swimming - simulatneously heavy and weightless. When art has the capacity to alter your physical state, it's powerful stuff.
The stark contrast of stepping in from the light and heat of an almost summers day,on the packed and odiferous streets of Chinatown into a black lit Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was nothing short of transormative. Her work takes sculpture to a place where the viewer isn't bound by the materials connection with an earth bound material, or an air bourne aspiration, but a phantasmagoric world made of foam, neon paint, and string, with an occasional Rankin Bass-like face eminating from a day-glo rock.
A small part of my response to Shipley's work was a personal remembrance going back to the late 70's, when as a teenager my friends and I would go to the mall and visit the back of Spencer Gifts where the lava lamps and black lights were displayed, knowing that this is the stuff that guys who drove Camaro's around the drag at the local beach bought to help them get laid. While Shipley's work did elicit a distant memory of the trappings of teenage seduction, I ultimately felt free, unselfconcious and content knowing that there is an artist who is not afraid to draw back the curtain and show us the underside, both beautiful and terrifying in it's depth and strangeness.
