C105 review

New York: H2o at Danese

Curated by Jo Isaak, H2o is a group show at Danese gallery that examines the well trod symbolic lineaments of if its topic - water. Water is nurturing. It is the oceanic, it is the unconscious, it is the oblivion of one's suicide dream. It is how the natural formlessness of water passes into this symbolic litany that is explored by artists from North America, the Caribbean and Europe.

Cuban artist Javier Machado is little known in the Unites States or Europe. In H2o he is represented by a small black-and-white photograph. It is a deceptively simple image - it could indeed be a family snapshot. A young man wades into the ocean, leading with him a large horse. The candid and transparent quality of the photograph emerges as a guileful ploy as a density of information accretes upon the image's surface. In mid-distance a small boat bobs upon the water - the type of craft used, perhaps, to flee the island? Further out in the bay rests a large sea-going vessel; the type of ship a fleeing Cuban, in the aforementioned small boat, might hope to be picked up by? In the foreground the boy smiles to camera. The final political detonation of this evolving Swiftian allegory comes with the title: El caballo - ' the horse'. 'The horse' is, it turns out, every Cuban's nickname for Castro. Having detonated the charge, Machado lets the shrapnel scatter as it will. Horses, for those who have been spoonfed Hollywood westerns, are the emblem of frontier and freedom. Or, on the other hand, could El Caballo be wading triumphantly in the Bay of Pigs?

For any new immigrants who do make it to America, Bonnie Rychlak will have a cautionary tale to tell about suburbia. In Waterwork IV Rychlak plants an ironic barb at the intersection of suburban opulence and modernist design. A resin-cast, miniature swimming pool - that is, the pool of water sans container - sits atop a podium composed of a mirror and a towel, all supported by the almost unnoticed legs of an Eames end table. If suburbia is the Hades many contemporary artists must flee, Rychlak re-coins the back-yard pool as the River Styx contained. No longer a moat between life and Hades, the Styx is now a recreational must-have within the latter. Meanwhile the end point to modernism's rupture of the established cultural trajectory seems to be Eames as buttress to this petit-bourgeois hell.

Rychlak is not the only artist to use furniture as a means to domesticate water. Mia Westerlund Roosen's Lake Louise shape-shifts from being, when viewed from the side at a short distance, an upside-down rendering of a mountain range, to, seen from up close and above, a deep lake of blue, blue water. Yet despite its seductive, morphing trickery the object stubbornly remains what it is: a beautifully functionless side table.

In Two or three things I know about her, Jean-Luc Goddard famously ruminates in voice over upon an image of coffee swirling in a cup. What came to be known as the 'cosmos in a coffee cup' scene was arguably the signal of Goddard's belief that cinematic narrative had collapsed. Dorothy Cross, in a deft appropriation of filmic narrative, provokes a similarly complex tale of intertextual weavings and collapsing yarns. In teacup she has of course placed the storm where it belongs. In this case the storm is from Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran. In their impossibly frail boats the natives of the western Isles of Ireland struggle against the storms of the North Atlantic - all video-projected into an oh-so-English teacup. Now the notion of the Irish as a storm in an English teacup is, to be sure, provocative. Many histories can be unfolded around this notion, not least the cannibal slur against the Irish that Cross here turns tartly on its head.

Eileen Neff is not correcting any specific image, but she certainly reminds us that perception is half projection. In an iris print titled figure/ground, Neff offers two views of a cloud brought indoors. In frame one it stands foreground in a doorway; in frame two the cloud has shifted to midground and lies horizontally hovering above the floor. Poltergeists and ghosts of one's own hallucinations while staring at the clouds inhabit Neff's photograph. The formless shape of the cloud is here anthropomorphized by its context (indoors) as much as by the hallucinatory projections of the viewer. A demi-narrative of mystery is implied, yet it is a narrative as untrustworthy as the shape of any cloud. And subtly through all this ambiguity photography's overworked claim to verisimilitude is cannily undone.

Sam Kunce's interest could be defined as the evolving relationship between ecology and aesthetics. The metaphor of H2o as life-sustaining, indeed as central to the eco-system, is literalized in Kunce's hydroponic mini-farm. From the tops of glass fishbowls sprout fine heads of lettuce nurtured by the water below them. In turn the lettuce produces roots that dangle into the water and nurture the goldfish that live there. Kunce's is a hermetic and utopian system. The piece is at once a happily quotidian drama of the day-to-day life of the fish (and the lettuce) and a lesson - without pedantry - upon ecology.

On another, much edgier, hand Carol Cole shifts us toward a more sinister, darker experience of water. For Cole in vessel the body is a submersible entity. Stripped down to its bare bones - mouth and lungs - Cole's version of the body presents a visage that is more wound than whole. Formed from resin and clay, Cole's small sculpture floats half-submerged in a plexiglass tank, suggesting more a Jules Verne anthropomorphic submarine than a Jeff Koons basketball. That one might drown in water is nowhere more clearly evoked than in Cole's piece. Indelicate questions about whether that would be an accidental or intentional event are silently passed over.

Water may indeed be everywhere but, as this smartly curated show suggests, it is not always safe to go in.

Laurence Hegarty is an artist and writer based in New York.

H2o, Danese Gallery, New York, July/August 2003

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