Why Archive?
The Harry Ransom Center explores its own raison d'être in a new exhibit

By Katherine Catmull
Austin Chronicle

It's brilliantly meta: The Harry Ransom Center, one of the world's great cultural archives, has created an exhibition about ... archives.

It's called "The Mystique of the Archive," and maybe a question mark just popped out over your head – mystique? Of the archives? Oh yes, my friend. Tom Stoppard, A.S. Byatt, and Julian Barnes, among many others, have created popular works based on that obsession-provoking mystique (Arcadia: A Play, Possession: A Romance, and Flaubert's Parrot, respectively). "Archives promise mystery, adventure, and discovery" for those who explore them, according to the HRC's press materials, and that's not overheated; it's exactly right.

So besides dusty, scribbled-on typescripts, moldy journals, and torn photos, what exactly is an archive? The exhibit quotes Irish playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry on his own archives: "It's a memory trail, like those old Victorian photos – is that a ghost? But here, it's a ghost of your work, a ghost of yourself. ... It's a haunted river, a long river." Almost as poetically, the exhibition calls an archive "the map that traces the trajectory of the imagination." Piecing together and following that map, meeting the ghosts on that river – that's the adventure for people like Stoppard and Byatt. Archives appeal to what the exhibit calls "the sustained magnetism of the authentic," the way certain objects become packed full of something like magic – a magic invested partly by their makers, partly by the attention and longing of millions of people over many years.

"The Mystique of the Archive" demonstrates how archives map the evolution of an idea "into a fully-developed work." (There's a pleasingly meta-meta display on Flaubert's Parrot, featuring the archives related to this book about archiving.) The exhibit also looks at how an archive represents the value of a work. That value may be cultural, but it's also cash-based – writers and their estates are not giving this stuff away. The HRC was never afraid to spend, and back in the Harry Ransom days, it attracted a reputation in England as a bit of a robber baron. To its credit, the exhibition addresses this issue, and co-curator Megan Barnard even pointed me to a recent Guardian article quoting HRC-collected British novelist Jim Crace on visiting the archive – "I held Blake paintings and Coleridge notebooks in my hand. I couldn't help thinking that they didn't belong there" – as well as an anonymous, gloomy British archivist: "Two things are inevitable: death and Texas." But Barnard points out that it is "differences in philanthropy and tax incentives in the two societies" that have put British institutions at a collecting disadvantage, adding that the HRC "has very collegial relationships with its peers in England, and I think most people are glad that these collections are being preserved, regardless of where they are housed." (Also, the British are hardly in a position to complain about other people nicking cultural artifacts.)

The exhibition notes that new technology such as word processing "increasingly challenges the traditional concept of archives." When writers work in Microsoft Word, archivists lose what the exhibition calls "false starts, the drafts that illustrate innumerable changes, cross-outs, and marginal notes [that] tell the story of how a work of literature was composed, how it came to be." Co-curator Cathy Henderson says that new technologies will not change the archive's essential mission, "because we will always collect, preserve, and make available the contemporary cultural record for the benefit of posterity." She adds, "Quite honestly, there is still a substantial amount recorded on paper that makes its way into the center."

At the end of the exhibit, you're asked to consider "what is in your own archive and how you will preserve it." Maybe you will give your Facebook page a little more respect now – and your LiveJournal and Flickr pages, come to think of it. When so much of what was once private archiving is now kept publicly online, what will become of archives? Henderson says that formal archives offer "focused and contextualized collecting that the unmediated 'archive' of weblogs and social networking sites does not enjoy." And Barnard observes, "Although more and more people are 'archiving' much about their lives on weblogs and social networking sites, most writers and artists are not using online venues to archive their creative work ... at least not yet."

"The Mystique of the Archive" exhibit runs Sept. 2-Jan. 4 at the Harry Ransom Center (21st & Guadalupe). See www.hrc.utexas.edu for more.

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British artist Susan Collis wants you to look - and then look again
At Lora Reynolds' new gallery, the leftover construction materials aren't what they seem

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
October 9, 2008

In our virtual world, where ready-made consumer goods arrive instantaneously and seemingly out of nowhere, it's easy to forget the physical work required to actually make most things. And it's also easy to overlook what might give an object its uniqueness.

Susan Collis gets this. And the Edinburgh-born, London-based artist sweetly teases our tendency to overlook in an exhibit at the new and expanded location of Lora Reynolds Gallery. It's Collis' first solo show in the United States.

At first glance, the new gallery looks empty. (Indeed, that's what many casual observers remarked at the opening reception last Saturday.) After three years tucked away on West Avenue, Reynolds has moved her operations into a much more prominent and larger space (about 1,200 square feet) on the ground floor of the newly opened 360 Condominiums.

A sleek wood desk graces the foyer, which in turn leads to the high-ceilinged, white-walled gallery, its floors a polished concrete.

A workman's dark blue painted-splattered coveralls hang on a peg. A push broom stands propped in one corner. Screws stick out of one wall. A worn table with stains looks haphazardly placed, askew in a far corner.

But take a second, closer look at those coveralls, that table and those screws. They're not what they seem.

Those paint spatters on the coveralls are really fine embroidery in delicate thread. The stains on that table? They're an inlay of mother-of-pearl, opal, conch shell and magnecite, expertly installed to look like the rings left by a can of white paint and the accompanying drippings. Those screws are made of white gold, platinum or silver; some are inlaid with tiny bits of diamond and other precious gems. And that push broom? The stains on its handle are inlay of turquoise, among other semi-precious stones, and the bit of debris caught in its bristles are luscious pearls.

Collis' show is an ingenious pick to open a new gallery location. In a brilliant and thoughtful manner, Collis has upended our assumptions about how we assign value to objects (including art objects) and about the act of art-viewing itself. The simple stuff of work and manual labor, seemingly left behind in a slick urbane art gallery, demands that we look at it and look at it again. By deliberately using precious and semi-precious gems, metals and stones, Collis gives her art objects an instant market-based — and easily recognized — value.

And that's the point. We're wired to assign value to certain things, certain materials and certain actions. And we're increasingly wired to overlook what's hand-made, what's unique and what can't be seen at first glance.

Since the gallery's opening in 2005, Reynolds has consistently brought to Austin a refreshingly international and national lineup of contemporary art that's gently and warmly ironic, full of questions and loaded with relevance to our times.

Just make sure you look — and look twice.

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Austin Museum of Art showcases 'Modern Lives'

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
October 9, 2008

Dana Friis-Hansen, executive director of the Austin Museum of Art, looks around the current exhibit, "Modern Art. Modern Lives. Then + Now," and sees plurality.

Issues of identity, justice, the environment, war and conflict, power and the search for meaning reverberate from the more than 70 contemporary artworks that crowd the museum's galleries. Works by established stars such as Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Sigmar Polke nuzzle next to the work of emerging Austin artists such as Peat Duggins and Sterling Allen, which in turn shares space with regional luminaries such Bob Wade and Julie Speed.

"Like a good democracy, there are lots of voices present here," says Friis-Hansen.

All of the art in "Modern Art. Modern Lives" is culled from AMOA's permanent collection as well as local private collections. It's the third major exhibit in recent years that the museum has organized using local collections.

"Curating from what's at our fingertips is an important part of our program," says Friis-Hansen. Doing so is a way not just to showcase what art the museum is acquiring, he says, but also what Austin art aficionados are collecting. He cautions that "Modern Art. Modern Lives" is not intended to be a "best of what's in Austin's private art collections." Rather, the exhibit is a quick view of a particular commonality that Austin art collectors, and the institutions they support, all share.

"Austin is a progressive city, and there's a curiosity here about how artists connect with the world," says Friis-Hansen. "It's refreshing that what's been collected here is some of the more edgier art that's being produced today, and so much of it is socially aware. That might not be true of a city that's not as socially conscious as Austin."

Hence in the exhibit there's "Crushed Cars #3," one of Seattle artist Chris Jordan's oversized, hyper-focused color photographs of the refuse of our consumer society. And there's Kehinde Wiley's "Elcias," one of the New York-based artist's large paintings of contemporary urban African American men in poses taken from heroic poses and famous portraits. Tom Molloy's "Crown" features a ring of delicate paper silhouette figures clad in menacing hoods that bear an unmistakable resemblance to the startling images that came out of the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib. These hooded figures are made of luminescent paper and stand atop a subtly glowing plastic box.

Besides social issues, what also distinguishes many of the more serious private art collections in Austin, Friis-Hansen notes, is a certain sense of inclusiveness — an inclusiveness that's reflected in "Modern Art. Modern Lives" with its mix of local, national and international artists.

And that habit of thinking globally and collecting locally — or at least partly locally — makes those involved in Austin's art economy have hope.

"Some of the artists (in Austin) are growing to a professional level that established collectors here are comfortable buying works by them," says Arturo Palacios, owner of Art Palace gallery, which represents, among others, artists Allen and Jonathan Marshall, whose work has been added to AMOA's collection and bought by local collectors. "That's exciting. It raises the bar for Austin. If there's the possibility for a local artist to be a part of a recognized private or public collection here, that adds an incentive for an artist to stick around in Austin."

Palacios added that part of the ramped-up interest in collecting locally has to do with the recognition and buzz Austin artists, galleries and museums are starting to get on the national level. Through trendy arts fairs in New York and Miami, Austin artists are participating in a broader market nationally. Collectors elsewhere are also starting to notice Austin artists, Palacios says. And hence collectors here are starting to notice as well. "It's a convergence between artists and collectors," Palacios says. "Artists here are growing and collectors here are meeting them halfway."

"I think we're an ecosystem and we're all related," says Friis-Hansen of the Austin visual arts scene. "It's important that (the museum) can help build an audience for local artists and help the artists here thrive financially and intellectually. And it's important for us to introduce artists from elsewhere to Austin."

Of course, it's not as though the museum makes building a collection a top priority. After all, AMOA doesn't have a regular line item for acquisitions in its $4.3 million annual operational budget. If an artwork is desired, special fundraising needs to happen in order to purchase it. The museum's high-dollar membership group known as the Director's Circle (annual fees are $1,000 to $5,000) earmarks about 10 percent of its membership dues to purchase one artwork a year. And all that translates, along with outright donations of artwork, to AMOA adding about a half-dozen to a dozen works of moderately priced contemporary art to its collection each year.

By comparison, the University of Texas' Blanton Museum of Art developed an impressive collection from over several decades thanks to notable gifts (James Michener's collection of American paintings, for example, or Barabara Duncan's donation of her Latin American art collection) and notable major purchases (the 1997 $35 million purchase of the Suida-Manning Collection of Renaissance and Baroque Art).

As a home-grown independent museum, AMOA has never had the resources that the UT-supported Blanton has.

"We're not at the point where we can make a list of the top 20 hottest artists and then set out to collect their work," says Friis-Hansen. "What we're doing is growing the collection organically, based on themes that parallel our exhibitions." For example, Friis-Hansen points out, after exhibiting Margo Sawyer's sprawling installation "Blue," the museum purchased the work by the Austin artist. Ditto with work by emerging Austin artists Barna Kantor and Young-Min Kang that was purchased after the museum exhibited it in its "New Art in Austin" triennial exhibit.

Likewise, by most measures (and measuring art collecting is almost impossible, given that buying and selling art is about as private and unregulated as any business transaction could be) Austin's private art collecting scene is nascent. The city is, after all, a demographically young city not known for a multiplicity of art supporters with deep pockets willing to donate or purchase art. A 2006 study by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan Washington research group, ranked Austin the No. 2 city in the country when it comes to hosting arts events but 51st when it comes to arts philanthropy.

Friis-Hansen remains optimistic, though.

"As Austin matures, it's getting more sophisticated in its art collecting," he says. "And you can see that (in this exhibit). This is strong and thoughtful and provocative art. And that's part of what Austin art collectors like."

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Jeffry Dell: Big Pelt
D Berman Gallery Through Nov. 1

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
October 10, 2008

If you're tired of the media's Chicken Little-like "the sky is falling" refrains, try contemplating something closer to the heart, such as hair growth. "Big Pelt" is a meditation on all things hairy by printmaker Jeffry Dell.

First off, "Big Pelt" is a great name for a show. It just sounds intriguing. And it's immediately complicated, like the art here. It prompts the question: Do I want a big pelt? Yes and no seems to be the answer. In Dell's artist statement, he confirms some thoughts on the ambiguous nature of body hair: "Hair happens. It arrives where we don't want it; we lose it where we do. Hair is both an expression of how insuppressible life is, while still being a reflection of the slow dissolution of life. It is both life force and entropy, youth and age, vigor and entropy."

Looking at hair is either attractive or very repulsive; there is little gray area in the emotional response to it. It's kind of fascinating and creepy. Dell is quite aware of this dual nature and plays with it in The Ravishing. This small, delicately detailed print features an eagle flying through a hole in the clouds while clutching a drooping hairy form. Though it may be based on a Michelangelo eagle, it seems to resemble the Greek Leda narrative, with the hairy form getting carried away through the sky looking suspiciously like angelic testicles. It's slightly patriotic. I think it's a very amusing and original piece of art.

Dell's series of small fade prints was made with acrylic and plastisol inks. They have a groovy Seventies composition with curved edges, suggesting a playing-card shape. The fades in the gradations of ink are quite op art as they are close in saturation. They are not neon colors but subdued in earthy tones. One in this series features a crushed-out cigarette, like a grim reaper in the tarot deck. On close inspection, it reveals itself to be hairy, thus abstractly connecting to the vigorous life force depicted in other works. It seems to be alive, a pleasure card.

Dell repurposed some moody black-and-white plates from an earlier, more somber series. He uses the gray, mysterious mezzotints as the background in two triptychs. These are overlaid with colorful silk-screened giant hairy figures in motion.

Dell's narrative is personally revealing. At times I feel like Dell tells me too much about himself. He wants viewers to squirm but keep looking, and he succeeds. This new batch of work connects directly to his past works while exhibiting a new vigor. He addresses the topics of growing hair and being hairy, aging, and a love-hate relationship with cigarettes. In Dell's accurate words, "Hair on the body of a loved one is cherished; on the body of a stranger it is repulsive, even frightening." Thanks for giving me something funny to think about while cleaning my bathroom.

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Blanton exhibit 'Reimagining Space' revisits influential yet overlooked 1960s artists
Their fascination with space and time put them at odds with their contemporaries. Now, the Park Place Group artists get a new appreciation.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
October 12, 2008

At first glance, the dynamic geometric shapes and vibrant colors of "Reimagining Space," the new exhibit at the Blanton Museum of Art, give off a hip and oh-so-current vibe. The kinetic forms, the zoomy lines, the bold electric hues are all very much the stuff of today's popular visual aesthetic reflected in everything from fine arts to home furnishings.

But then consider this: Everything in "Reimagining Space" was created four decades ago by a tight group of 10 artists in New York who have been largely overlooked by art history. And until University of Texas art history professor Linda Dalrymple Henderson went on a search for it, most of what's on display now at the Blanton was tucked out of public view, forgotten by museums, collectors and scholars alike.

That makes "Reimagining Space" an exhilarating reunion — a chance to both get to know and to celebrate a collective whose influence was important yet whose recognition has been spotty. "Reimagining Space" is the first time since the 1960s that these works have been on view together the way they were originally.

The 10 artists featured in "Reimagining Space" first converged in 1962 in a top-floor loft at 79 Park Place in lower Manhattan. Though they organized exhibitions at their newly named Park Place Gallery, the loft was as much a social gathering venue as anything else. The group shared a love of free-form improvised jazz, progressive social concerns and mind-bending contemplations of the space-time continuum, Einstein's theory of relativity and ideas of an alternate dimension.

New York City gave the artists much of their creative charge, too. Flashing neon signs, vivid stop lights, the zooming impressions created by rushing taxis and trucks resulted in canvases sporting hues of yellow and red found in traffic signs or glowing greens and blues.

The sheer mass and scale of the transforming urban landscape was creative fodder, too. Park Place was just north of where the World Trade Center was being built, and much of the neighborhood was slated for demolition as part of the city's radical urban renewal effort. Discarded construction supplies and old building materials became sculpture. Much of the sculpture moved, with wood and steel elements hung like a mobile and gently turning around.

When the building at Park Place was demolished in 1964, the group of five sculptors (Mark di Suvero, Peter Forakis, Robert Grosvenor, Anthony Magar and Forrest Myers) and five painters (Dean Fleming, Tamara Melcher, David Novros, Edwin Ruda and Leo Valledor), relocated their activities to a large storefront on West Broadway in Greenwich Village, establishing their new home as a nonprofit collective. (The sprawling, high-ceilinged semi-industrial space became the prototype for the SoHo and Chelsea galleries that emerged years later. And the nonprofit artist collective has seen a recent resurgence in the last few years.)

Again, the music followed the art. Experimental composer Steve Reich gave his first New York concert at the gallery. And the Park Place artists formed their own group — the Park Place Band — that played free jazz in multi-hour jam sessions.

The group continued its aesthetic love affair with notions of alternative dimensions. Optical illusions and paradoxical spatial effects filled large canvases, many of which were radically shaped — another expression of the group's penchant for new theories of space and time. "I see color as space," painter Valledor once declared, another time claiming "by fourth-dimensional color I mean the notion that it exists within time."

Though the Park Place Group's optimistic explorations put them in step with many of their creative peers in other fields, they weren't favored much by the art establishment, particularly the critics who advocated that paintings be flat and sculpture be "specific objects." The Park Place Gallery closed in 1967, and the artists dispersed to purse their careers independently. For the next 40 years, their contributions as a group remained a footnote.

Though the Blanton had several paintings by Novros and Fleming, four of which are featured in "Reimagining Space," Henderson spent more than three years tracking down the art made by the Park Place Group in order to stage the current exhibit. And her journey says everything about how the group's contribution was forgotten.

Henderson found Myers' giant aluminum sculpture "Ziggarat and W and WWW" in disarray in the backyard of a Santa Fe, N.M., collector. It's been beautifully restored for the current show. In the basement storage of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Henderson turned up Valledor's painting "The Calm." The cerebral painting featuring a vibrant arrangement of blue and black asymmetrical stripes is now the cover image for the "Reimagining Space" catalog (the first catalog of its kind on the Park Place artists). Philadelphia museum officials were so pleased that Henderson brought the work to their attention that it will go on permanent display when it returns from Austin.

In a neatly planned convergence, UT's new public art program, Landmarks, recently installed di Suvero's massive 41-foot steel sculpture, "Clock Knot," in front of the Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Building at Dean Keeton Street and Speedway. On long-term loan from the artist, "Clock Knot" was dedicated on Sept. 26, the day "Reimagining Space" opened at the Blanton. The university intends to purchase "Clock Knot" for its public art collection.

Four decades late and half a continent away, the Park Place Gallery is more popular than ever.

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'Modern Art. Modern Lives. Then + Now'
Austin Museum of Art – Downtown Through Nov. 2

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
October 17, 2008

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

A quick stroll through Austin Museum of Art's dual exhibit "Modern Art. Modern Lives. Then + Now" might prompt the natural response that art sure has changed since the impressionists were slinging paint.

But linger a little in both halves of the show, and you may spy threads of commonality between "Then" and "Now," enough to suggest that art, even in these digitized, deconstructed days, is the same as it ever was.

To be sure, artists of the present employ so many different kinds of media, some of which didn't even exist a century ago (large-print photography, video, plastics, computer graphics), as to make those no-tech paints and charcoals of the 19th century seem quaint by comparison. And technology unavailable to the artists of yesteryear is not only being used to make art, but it's being used as the subject of art. In works such as Chris Jordan's large photographs Recycling Yard #6, Seattle, 2004 and Crushed Cars #3, Tacoma, 2004, the artist is training his eye on a mass-production/mass-consumption culture unknown when van Gogh was painting the bridge over the Seine at Asnières.

And yet, at its essence, the impulse generating Jordan's art is no different than the one inspiring van Gogh. Both strive to see the world they live in with fresh eyes and to present it in a way that provokes us to see the world in new ways, too. With Jordan, it may be scale that does the trick: mountains of mangled metal that jolt us into recognizing the monstrous amounts of waste we discard and rarely think about. With van Gogh, it may be color: those azures and ultramarines against glowing pinks that set the bridge's underside and its watery reflection in electric counterpoint. But both succeed in creating arresting alternative visions of the world, images that expand our view beyond what we would likely see left to our own eyes.

That impulse reveals itself over and over throughout the show's "Then" and "Now" sections (or, as they're formally titled, "19th and 20th Century Artists at the Turn of the Century" and "Where Are We Going? Contemporary Artists Address Issues of the 21st Century"). And when you key into it, the separate sections feel more like they're in conversation, that the artists across that century gap are nodding in agreement: "Yes, that's what I was trying to do." Then, Anne Appleby's Shirley Poppy, with a flower abstracted into four panels of flat color, seems like an extension of Paul Signac's pointillist experiments with hue in The Bridge of la Félicité, Asnières, and Pablo Picasso's cubist portraits, with their multiple angles of a single face, prefigure Noah Kalina's time-lapse video, Everyday January 11, 2000-July 31, 2006, stringing together thousands of images of his face over a span of six years.

And as you come to see that shared urge to create among all these artists, you can sense a restlessness among them all, too, a desire to find those edges in the culture, the places yet to be claimed and commodified by society. AMOA Executive Director Dana Friis-Hansen, who curated the contemporary section, identifies its questing nature in his exhibit's title, but it applies to the older artists, too, although it's harder to see in their works; since impressionism has become visual comfort food, we've lost our taste for how daring it once was, how it tested the boundaries of art in its day. But if you take a second pass through the "Then" section after being charged by the "Now," you may be more sensitive to the current of experimentation and risk at work. As assembled by curator James Housefield in his last show for AMOA, this art of our past is pushing forward, moving ahead of the curve, exploring, just as the art of the present is today. Some things never change, and for that we can be grateful.

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Susan Collis: Why Did I Think This Was a Good Idea'
Lora Reynolds Gallery Through Nov. 15

By Andrew Long
Austin Chronicle
October 31, 2008

Everything is not what it appears to be. Let's just start with that.

Complacency and sleight of hand seem acceptable currently. (Rome has been burning for a long, long time.) Stepping into an art gallery, sometimes you may purposely want to be fooled and revel in that mystery. Investigate with caution. Peel back the exhibition's surface layers to determine if you are being swindled or serenaded. That will take effort, but the payoff is worth it.

One of the greatest techniques of illusion is trompe l'oeil, which dates back to the Baroque period. It literally means "trick the eye." When used to maximum effect, it can be deceptively delightful. Austin art-goers have witnessed several variations of this creative technique in the past year. Florian Slotawa reconfigured Arthouse's floor plan to seemingly nothing. His daring effort carved up the gallery space, tricking the sense memory. Austin Museum of Art's Sol LeWitt exhibition included Sylvia Plimack Mangold's Untitled (Study for "Portrayal"), which was so convincingly painted that it fooled many into thinking the depicted masking tape was real. You can still view the Blanton Museum of Art's recent acquisition Crystal Swallow, Marilyn Minter's überrealistic painting of a woman's lipsticked mouth and jewels. The image is so perfect, you may purposefully choose to be fooled by it, even though you might have a nagging feeling that the image is fake.

Sometimes the obvious is the most difficult to see. Hiding in plain sight, Lora Reynolds Gallery seems to be Austin's best-kept secret. For the past three years, it has presented the highest caliber national and international artists, many of whom have given a short talk on opening night. The gallery has triumphed again with this showing of British artist Susan Collis, its inaugural exhibition in its new, larger Downtown space.

Collis is an outsider. She began art school at age 40 and became interested in how materials could challenge the viewer's perception of reality and expectations. She creates masterful objects that can never be taken at face value. On the gallery wall hang blue work coveralls dappled with paint drips. Closer inspection reveals those paint drips to be colored thread made to look like paint. The gallery walls are adorned with screws and Sheetrock plugs. No, they are faux, created from black diamonds, 18 carat gold, and sapphire, materials that brutally comment on the wealthy and powerful art world. The eye delights in these discoveries.

Collis explores creative time by developing fake history. A wooden table is stained with paint-can splatters. Were the gallery installers messy, and did they forget to clean up? These ringed paint markings are composed of everything except paint, mostly slivers of pearl laminate.

Throughout this thoughtful exhibition, Collis creates art about the act of creating art as a deft memorial. She vigorously questions the nature of the traditional white-cubed gallery by creating an expert hoax. Her work is not conceptual but transgressive as it disorients the viewer and questions the creative work ethic, expectations, mark making, and perception.

Collis' illusionistic installation comes with precedent. Lora Reynolds has a history of presenting work that radically shifts the viewer's perception and questions reality: Conrad Bakker's carved-wood faux Post-it notes highlighting the gallery walls' imperfections and Oliver Boberg's seemingly large-scale environments photographed from miniature constructed sets.

Collis' exhibition is a must-see if you are intent on looking, because just wandering around the gallery will have you wondering if you arrived before the installation of the work was completed. In this case, choose to be tricked.

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