.Decoys

Two artists come to terms with unreality.

Tut’s return to San Francisco raises old issues about the art
object’s multiple identities as locus of mana, or magical power,
as embodiment of social belief, and, ultimately, as historical
artifact. Our secular, scientific, materialist culture eschews the
notions of ultimate truth, scientific or artistic, so it’s interesting
to speculate on how future societies will view us based on what future
archaeologists unearth from our buried treasure troves. Will future art
historians be able to reanimate Jasper Johns’ Decoy? The au
courant issues of representation and meaning, explored by conceptual
artists Kelsey Nicholson and Ken Fandell, viewed in a
wider perspective, however, fit right into the continuum of art. We
walk like Egyptians.

Nicholson is known for her installations treating natural themes
with synthetic, artificial materials — woodsy environments of
wood-grained laminate populated by cardboard model-kit-style birds.
They’re both a parody of the commercial/utopian fakery Americans love
(e.g., Disneyland, Las Vegas, planned communities, and a humorous mash
note to creativity and confusion). Nicholson, who forages for materials
at Home Depot, says, “Green carpet is exactly the same as grass for me,
wood paneling is exactly the same as a tree.” Here she’s exhibiting
Camouflage Birds, life-size wooden models of mallard, owl, hawk,
and heron that have been collaged with rectangles of printed paper at
various levels of resolution — digital plumage or pixelated bad
hi-def mummy wrappings. The birds rest atop wooden shelves surrounded
by trees and terrain made of wooden shingles or fieldstones, actually
shims, that rhyme visually with the faux feathers. Nicholson also is
showing photos mounted on plywood from her Flat Land series,
small epiphanies extracted from the phenomenal world.Fandell, too, is
showing photographs, but with a more conceptual take. The four larger
pieces here derive from the artist’s fascination with the art/science
nexus, which has already resulted in huge 4’x10′ foot composite
photographs of hundreds of clouds and long, table-mounted arrays of
satellite photos. Here he’s investigating the 2003 Hubble Ultra Deep
Field image, a million-second exposure looking back in space-time
thirteen billion years to just after the big bang. In “Part 1,” Fandell
ironically double-prints the appropriated image out of register and
focus so that it appears to be a 3D image for which we lack the
requisite red and blue specs (for Doppler-shifted light waves?).
Another photo depicts the handwritten fraction 12,999,999/13,000,000
— what we don’t know about the big picture. “Evermore” assembles
multiple photos of the Hubble telescope itself into an irregular white
circle set against the blackness of space — a ring like a
particle collider, or 1950s-style space station, or spiked medieval
instrument of enhanced interrogation, or the mythic serpent Ouroboros,
eating its own tail. Through July 25 at Traywick Contemporary
(895 Colusa Ave., Berkeley). Traywick.com or 510-527-1214

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