Lauren Levy: Beneath the Palm of My Hand
Levy's latest work is no less compelling for moving from three to two dimensions
Reviewed by Wayne Alan Brenner, Fri., May 15, 2009
'Lauren Levy: Beneath the Palm of My Hand'
D Berman Gallery
Through May 30
Lauren Levy, mistress of all buttons and one of the locally based but world-class pantheon of visual artists, moves her compelling creations from three into two dimensions within this exhibition of her newest works. In addition to the more familiar objects built from hundreds of precisely arranged buttons, now there are buttons stitched into a variety of flat fabrics.
Observe: black squares of cloth to provide a simple background for button-based images of, for example, scissors and their permutations; long riverlike ribbons of material with buttons describing the currents and eddies while suggesting also the pebbles below the flowing depths of the works' inspiration; all of these fabrics worked with myriad stitches just short of quilting, some bordered with contrasting triangles, the careful adornments adding subtle texture to these pieces along the walls and the floor and over chairs in D Berman Gallery's small and elegant space.
"The linear quality of time is one that is false but it does lie behind the motif of the flow of water as a metaphor for the passing of time," says the artist in her statement for this show. And, perhaps to illustrate the contention, there are the sculptures more representative of Levy's earlier period; but even in these – Bit of Fluff and What Flew Out of the Dark – time and Levy have wrought mutations, shifting the familiar doll-sized dress-forms into shapes more evocative of tiny costumes for some Lovecraftian elder gods. She builds intense fascination with these fasteners wrought from ivory, bone, or humble plastic – a fascination undiminished when applied to the Flatland vistas of two dimensions.
Time flows on, according to our perception of the process, and if Levy's work isn't in your past, this gorgeous exhibition may brighten your future even more than it does that of a longtime aficionado. There's no time like the present, they say, and this buttony work is a present for all time.
