September 21-27, 2006
Arts Agenda : Last Chance
Last ChanceCatch It or Regret It
Carpenter's photos layer pictures he took while traveling the U.S. and Europe with maps, ID cards and other tourist detritus. The collages don't ask how we can get beyond the exotic cliches (or iconic images, if you prefer) of the places we visit so much as revel in them.
This exhibit of pop-influenced illustrations from the last 50 years is a glorious excuse to place a diverse array of loosely connected work in one room: Peter Sault's Day-Glo nightmare; a Red Grooms poster from the Guggenheim; Paul Henry Ramirez's weird sexual geometries; Yoshitomo Nara's mischievous imps (pictured); John Wesley's insolvably ambiguous "boyfriends" screenprint; and Mexican artist Enrique Chagoya's El Regresso del Caribal Macrobiótica, a play on South American codices that combines Mexican religious iconography, conquistador engravings and images from American comic books.
Korean transplant Myung Jin Choi's clay sculptures play with repeated forms and colorone wall-mounted sculpture is like a city block seen from above, the thrusting forms softened and left somewhere between manmade and organic. In another sculpture, ascending and descending lines of suspended pink diamonds recall chimes and musical harmonies.

