Seconds of Something |
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An afternoon at PS1 in Long Island City offers a panoramic view of contemporary artists. One such artist to take note of is Phoebe Washburn. Ms. Washburn's installation titled "Seconds of Something" is a sprawling morass of discarded wood remnants, news print and mis-tinted paint unusable and undesirable for consumption it finds its way into this wave of wood and scaffold lunging from one end of the gallery to the other like a frightful quasi rollercoaster-skateboard ramp. Loose boards, protruding splinters and screws provide the skin to the rickety wooden skeleton poking and prodding from below creating the effect of peaks and valleys like the waves upon an ocean. Floating upon the surface are concentric shapes composed of old newsprint painted in a full spectrum of color. Each cluster of colored paper is created and colored based on the relationship between time and consumption of paper. The color association with cumulative consumption over time is not a particularly dominant idea and the color associations appear to be arbitrary but this is secondary to the overall strong physicality Washburn's installation. This work, like many of this young artists projects has some visual lineage to the works of Judy Pfaff in the way that she hijacks the space with an excited mania of material and process and bends the invaded the environment without apology. There is something unnerving about the experience. Standing in the middle of this complex structure there is a degree of anxiety which pulls you into the work and doesn't let go. Washburn, refers to her work as "spontaneous architecture" and this is idea is reinforced through a misleading slap-dash appearance of effortlessness. Don't miss this ambitious wave of wood and clutter that seems on the edge of consuming the entire space and the viewer along with it. By Andrew Robinson
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