Anyone (like me) who still laments last year's closure of David Cunningham Projects needs to hightail it over to The Lab to see the group show there right now curated by Mr. Cunningham himself. The title of the exhibition is Enter Slowly, and those two words serve as both instruction and as a reference to the way many of the participating artists involve architecture in their work. The first thing you encounter when you pass through the gallery doors is Maud Cotter's sculpture More Than Anything cascading down the front stairs, consisting of individual birch panels joined together into a structure that is able to be tweaked to fit the space. That piece leads you almost directly to another large sculpture, Cath Campbell's 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, which the artist has created out of cut corrugated cardboard. It is a structure both imposing and delicate, and those elements are also present in her architectural renderings in paper and steel. That push/pull between the permanent and the changeable is echoed again in Anna Barham's beautifully-constructed anagrams and her fiberboard sculpture (Tangram) Posture that dominates the center of the gallery. Tangrams and the way they fit together are also a theme in Linda Quinlan's geometrically-abstracted drawings and video Side Step, while Laura Gannon explores modernist motifs both in her video A House in Cap-Martin and in her series of glass plates painted with child-like renderings of high-design furniture. Some of those images look as if they could have been clipped from Alexandra Navratil's video Objects Perceive Me, a free-flowing succession of pictures that the artist has collected over time. The stream-of-consciousness aspect of the video contrasts nicely with the precise black-and-white shapes of Navratil's drawings, small pieces that yet manage to be imposing in their study of light and shadow. This is not a show you rush through, and the longer you spend in the gallery the more layers will be revealed. It's well worth the time.
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