New York Reviews

"Westworld"

Mary Boone

Critic Max Henry used the plot of a mediocre sci-fi movie, the 1973 Michael Crichton film Westworld, as the curatorial conceit for this engaging group show. The movie, which depicts a theme park where androids help humans realize their fantasies, stars Yul Brynner as a cowboy robot gone berserk with bloodlust. Translating this concept into a gallery show, Henry imaginatively juxtaposed pieces by nine artists working in disparate styles. Together, these works provoked us to examine our current man-made environments rather than take a predictably nostalgic look at retro notions of the future.

The show opened with Adjustments: She Is Ready for More, a lightbox by Kiki Seror featuring a swirl of digitally rendered lascivious texts. The dichotomy between the heat of the language and the coolness of the computer-generated words cleverly highlighted the inadequacy of machine-mediated attempts at long distance intimacy. Nearby, Damian Loeb's oil painting Room 237, featuring a physically perfect seductress waiting behind a half-opened door in a hotel suite, played neatly into this Westworld ethos. And Jay Davis's abstract Untitled: Five Colors Falling, with its paint splatters and what appear to be Jetsons-like architectural details, could be interpreted as a chaotic futuristic landscape, where the man-made has outlasted mankind.

Similarly sinister were the photographs. Doug Hall's Wild Blue Yokohama documents an indoor faux beach in Japan, and Katharina Bosse's pristine Operating Room seems a portrait of lifelessness rather than sterility and health. In all, the ultramodern world comes off as creepy and unsettling, far from a futuristic fantasyland.

— Reena Jana