Visiting the Swarm gallery last week, I was innately attuned to the sunlight streams breaking the gallery's glass façade. Eight months ago, writing my first review, the sun struck the same acute descent. This go-round, however, the waning Northern Hemisphere doesn't promise brighter days ahead. (Obama does, though. Vote November 4!) Neither, today, is Swarm dominated by tumbling, encroaching, floor-standing sculpture; at first glance it resembles a decorated, unfurnished domestic space. Only two sculptures tread away from the wall--swim away, you might say--and they do so with a minimal footprint. In addition, one wall ostensibly serves as a floor, the whole plane of projections of sea-anemone-like creatures flipped 90 degrees askew.

It's impossible to resist full attention, microscopic attention, to the intricate individual polyps on this wall. Each is different from the 30-40 others; collectively, this scattered mass is titled Army, but outside of science fiction, I've never seen an interspecies army (see Ria Brodell's work below for more. ) Besides, it looks more like a Navy, but I'm just nit-picking now. Kaleidoscope is how I might re-title it, each symmetrical creature a new turn of the cylinder. The segmentation and aggregation of tiny elements is almost insect-like: in most cases, a three-part formula emerges, defining abdomen, thorax, and head quite clearly. Aside from this observation, most description becomes nebulous. Plant? Animal? Fungi?

 

Were this work not a product of the previous few years, I might diagnose Adams with a Spore addiction. The colors and bubbly whimsicality appear to be a clean tear from Will Wright's Candyland ecology. And when you're within "breathe softly" distance, examining the craft, the artificiality of materials truly pops: plastic beads, hot glue rivulets, downy faux-feathers, flocking, and other Michaels miscellanea are Adams' bread-and-butter. Only a few dead plant parts and some tightly carved wooden elements with impeccable graded paint application can fight back the Troll hair.

This extends beyond the Army, to the other-upright, shall we say, creations on display. From each welded candelabrum-type wall mount, I almost expected a bioluminescent emission from these plantimals. Like a waiter carrying an exotic dish, the steel arm's "s" shape exudes grace in its generous presentation of the creature. The stellar service doesn't stop there: the lovingly executed wrapping, dipping, brushing, and threading of each element seems to justify its own existence.

Immense detail oozes everywhere, down to the felt trim covering on the wall mounts. Check the little pink finger nibs offset by the cheap gold felt...or the wart-speckled base of another organism, sweeping up a two-tone neck to a blonde Beeker head. There's great subtlety in the use of verisimilitude too, which mercifully is not overused. Earthworms and leaves and petals and pine cones are  about all I could firmly tack down. The strangest hybrids are the few asymmetrical items on display. They're amazing in the associations they spew freely. Imagine a squid-manatee-sex toy fusion with a golf-ball-pocked head and a vaginal mouth--or foot? Or foot-in-mouth? All of this is achieved with the most modest of means. Adams is a master of material misuse.

 

Unfortunately, she also grossly misused the opportunity and challenge that is the Artist Statement. To grant her the benefit of the doubt, I'd say she's using it as a soapbox to propel some ancillary ideas she holds about society, culture, and life that haven't yet manifested in her work but will. More pessimistically, she's injecting a false significance, a subversive element, into work that I don't read as subversive in any way. The pretense of an ironic superficiality clashes with her silly Seuss titles (Ruffled Muff; Flinderspindle) and strikes me as totally artificial where her work does not.

 

Ria Brodell, whose works complement Adams' at Swarm, may be the antidote. On paper, she merely launches into the roles and relationships of her creations and lays the groundwork for the ensuing action. She, like Adams, is a budding lexicographer, christening her homemade species with reckless abandon. On the surface, I'm frankly less interested in Brodell's work, which comprises mixed-media drawings of chimerical animals in cold, Spartan landscapes. These Muppets-in-Hell would seem trite in a group show, as no single piece represents the epic justly, but allowed to flourish as a consistent universe, they're compelling. There seems to be a charge in the air between the animals.  More than just a narrative, there's politics imbedded. On top of this, there appears a self-managing system, a biological stasis. Much like Trenton Doyle Hancock's world of invention, Brodell has gone beyond novel visuals to script a visual novel, or at least a novella. This, of course, has the opportunity to grow stronger with time.

 

What does a visual novel look like? Marching shrubs, resembling Kraing from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (trust me), flood in from the horizon as the viewer gazes down over the shoulder of a bird-human chimera. (Known as Northern Birdmen, these creatures are all professorial-male types, with the kind of beards you have to reach out and stroke.) The threat of these militant shrubs is abated by the bird's position, but the view creates a tension as this hypothetically infinite army presses on, flags planted.

 

When the different animals do get together and cohabit, like an African watering hole scene, they each keep wary and distant. The Wormbunnies check out the wolves, who check out the birds, who check out the yaks, each with a kind of back-to-the-wall discretion. Indeed, nobody wants to be unable to escape the threat of the others and nobody wants to be in the middle of the interspecies mosh pit. Most haunting is the small drawing of a predator pack splayed patiently inside a canyon, titled A Guineasaur Village at Night. Presumably, members of a prey species sit atop high ladders as a bleak night sky rages with star activity like a Vija Celmins painting. Night almost advances off the page, an oppressive 1/3 of the piece. No, there will be no interspecies armies here.

 

 

*Images, from top to bottom: Renee Adams,"Flinderspindle, 2008," polymer clay, shoe polish, leather, wood map pins, 8" x 7" 7."  Renee Adams, ""Army (68 pieces), 2008," wood, fur, acrylic paint, mixed media, dimensions vary.  Renee Adams, "Crowned Polylyp, 2008," glass, polymer clay, wood, flocking, mixed media, 9" x 5.5" x 5.5." Renee Adams, "Ruffled Muff, 2008," wood, polymer clay, flocking, mixed media, 6.5" x 8" x 8." Ria Brodell, The Northern Birdmen Attack, 2008," pencil on paper, 14" x 8.5." Ria Brodell, "Gathering in the Mountains, 2008," penicl and acrylic on paper, 31" x 44." " Ria Brodell, "Wormbunnies Arrrive in the Mountains, 2008," pen and acrylic on paper, 11" x 14."

 

Images courtesy of the artists and Swarm Gallery.