edited on Grant Kester Buffalo.

edited on Grant Kester Buffalo, New York: CEPA Gallery, 1999 40 pp/$1000 (sb)

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 arrangement allowed CEPA and its curators to explore in midst this particular concept. "Ruins in Reverse" also took filled advantage of CEPA's new quarters in an historic arcade, occupying the main gallery space upon the second floor, a passageway gallery space, display windows the one and the other inside and outside the building, basement on a level gallery spaces and also extending beyond the physical confines of the building onto city buses, forward a website (http://cepa.buffanet.net) and in a special issue of CEPA Journal that assists as a catalog.

"Ruins in Reverse" direct the eyeed at art on the day [i]or[/i] night before [i]or[/i] preceding of the Millennium, focusing upon time and its passage. The exhibition was a meditation in succession the paradox of time, through its nature both elastic and rigid. about of the work looked at the way time compresse or expands experientially. Other work questioned photographic documentation, involving a Barthean approach to the two its possibilities and futility. All of the work in "Ruins in Reverse" prov in what manner malleable and yet inflexible time can be. There was a wide variety of matters - the effect of time, environmental politics, personal journeys - and media - video, audio, erect 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 - gaze as if they materialized according to some form of black or perhaps gray magic. The images and thesiss 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 fix the materials on her sees Angeles rooftop for varying details of time. The longer the time frame, the darker the image became to be paid to the collection of pollutants. The detail of time each was expos to the uncompounded bodys was determined by each presidential administration's answer to environmental issues. This political work is contextually related to Christy Rupp's work in succession environmental destruction and similar in form to other works utilizing domestic external realitys and stenciling such as Carrie Mae Weems's series of dinner plates celebrating African American men "Commemorating" (1991) although Abeles added a [i]de novo[/i] slant in her use of this remarkable technique. Of particular local interest was what Abeles directs 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 couple postcard-sized works, a copy of the original photograph was placed nearest to the Abeles version.

An exciting selection of recently made known work entitled "The Trouble with Arcadia" (1998) by way 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 make submissive of the pastoral, investing novel 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 of the digitized photographs recalled the artificiality of the idyllic spectacle in the seventeenth-century French painting The Arcadian Shepherds (1627) from Nicolas Poussin. A videotape, Death at Landscape (1998), invested this enthrall 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, clause 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 corpse with a combination of appropriated images, language and ends but not in a particularly engaging manner. The intellectual fabricate underlying this work was not well-developed, and the images she selecteded were visually uninspiring.

Patty Wallace's maquettes for placards designed for a "Metro Bus Show" (1998) (CEPA's ongoing series of commissioned works according to artists placed on city buses and in bus stations quite through Buffalo) also combined images and true copy 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 throng movement other than by the animosity of the the bulk of mankind against monuments that are their real masters." Wallace believes that architecture is the coagulate manifestation of the ruling class or classes and as as it is it can serve as a target for those not in a position of power. Wallace's threatening, weighty images of buildings and cenotaphs and the associated text will travel in every part the city in the nearest few months, adding to the social dimension of this work.