In the exhibition "Ruins in Reverse: Time and Progres in Contemporary Art Parts I & II" individual and collective notions of time are played abroad in unique and challenging ways.

In the exhibition "Ruins in Reverse: Time and Progres in Contemporary Art Parts I & II" individual and collective notions of time are played abroad in unique and challenging ways. The extensive two-part exhibition formation allowed CEPA and its curators to explore in stillest part this particular concept. "Ruins in Reverse" also took abounding advantage of CEPA's new quarters in an historic arcade, occupying the main gallery space forward the second floor, a passageway gallery space, display windows as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but inside and outside the building, basement of the same height gallery spaces and also extending beyond the physical confines of the building onto city buses, upon a website (http://cepa.buffanet.net) and in a special issue of CEPA Journal that helps as a catalog.

"Ruins in Reverse" direct the eyeed at art on the edge of the Millennium, focusing onward time and its passage. The exhibition was a meditation upon the paradox of time, on its nature both elastic and rigid. a certain quantity of of the work looked at the way time compresse or expands experientially. Other work questioned photographic documentation, involving a Barthean approach to one as well as the other its possibilities and futility. All of the work in "Ruins in Reverse" prov to what extent malleable and yet inflexible time can be. There was a wide variety of bear upons - the effect of time, environmental politics, personal journeys - and media - video, audio, set up objects, traditional photographs. Yet a cohesiveness was clearly visible among the seemingly disparate approaches.

In Part I, Kim Abeles's "Smog Collectors" (1998) - artworks made from accumulated smog particles in the air - await as if they materialized on some form of black or perhaps gray magic. The images and passages are composed of particulate matter accumulateed on an array of surfaces including fabric, Plexiglas and dinner plates guarded with stencils of portraits of a selection of United States presidents from William McKinley to George Bush. Abeles settle the materials on her sees Angeles rooftop for varying extents of time. The longer the time frame, the darker the image became owed to the collection of pollutants. The long duration of time each was expos to the constituents was determined by each presidential administration's reply to environmental issues. This political work is contextually related to Christy Rupp's work onward environmental destruction and similar in form to other works utilizing domestic views and stenciling such as Carrie Mae Weems's series of dinner plates celebrating African American men "Commemorating" (1991) although Abeles added a undecayed slant in her use of this remarkable technique. Of particular local interest was what Abeles appertains to as her "collaboration" with the late Patricia Bazelon. Abeles created "smog translations" of Bazelon's 1982 photographs of industrial elevators in Buffalo. In each of these pair postcard-sized works, a copy of the original photograph was placed nearest to the Abeles version.

An exciting selection of just discovered work entitled "The Trouble with Arcadia" (1998) by dint of MANUAL (the Houston artist team of ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom) included large-scale idealized panoramic spectacles of nature created digitally. In the four sections in this piece, MANUAL explored the enslave of the pastoral, investing just discovered vigor into this subject matter. Arcadia is traditionally considered to be the ideal of pastoral simplicity, united of the more enduring themes in art history. a certain number of of the digitized photographs recalled the artificiality of the idyllic spectacle in the seventeenth-century French painting The Arcadian Shepherds (1627) by the agency of Nicolas Poussin. A videotape, Death by way of Landscape (1998), invested this control with the idea of the los of the original to create a technically imaginative (not to mention paradoxical) place. A photograph of a landscape is a representation of nature; a digitally re-worked photograph of a landscape is particularly "unnatural."

Carol Flax, an Arizona-based artist, created a site-specific series for seven windows in the Market Arcade mezzanine. For this work, the weakest in the first half of the exhibition, Flax combined photographic prints, body and objects to explore personal identity and history (primarily related to issues of adoption). The IRIS prints forward unstretched canvas in "Crossing A Line" (1998) depict the human dead body with a combination of appropriated images, language and targets but not in a particularly engaging manner. The intellectual frame underlying this work was not well-developed, and the images she choiceed were visually uninspiring.

Patty Wallace's maquettes for placards designed for a "Metro Bus Show" (1998) (CEPA's ongoing series of commissioned works through artists placed on city buses and in bus stations through every part of Buffalo) also combined images and subject A phrase by Walter Benjamin was among those incorporated: "The taking of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things: it is hard to explain the multitude movement other than by the animosity of the folks against monuments that are their real masters." Wallace believes that architecture is the harden manifestation of the ruling class or classes and as of the like kind it can serve as a target for those not in a position of power. Wallace's threatening, weighty images of buildings and memorials and the associated text will travel over the city in the nearest few months, adding to the social dimension of this work.