It's an ambitious idea. Model-making, dreaming up alternate worlds, and the expansion of the artist's landscape from two dimensions (painting, photography) into three all offer potent possibilities for installation artists. Unfortunately, it's impossible not to measure "Trainscape" against the detailed little landscapes that inspired it, and it comes up lacking. The installations are too disparate. Running trains through the whole thing doesn't make it cohere, it just makes you want it to.
Ralph Helmick's piece "Fourteenth Way" puts the best spin on the "Trainscape" concept. The title refers to Wallace Stevens's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," suggesting that the installations offer 12 ways of looking at a model railroad. It's easier, though, to make those leaps within a modernist poem than in a landscape.
In Helmick's gorgeous piece, the track passes between two hills made of paper-thin letters strung on wires; they could as easily represent a flock of birds startled to flight. Language, like the miniature railroad, is another model for reality - so is conceptual art. Helmick gracefully packs all three into one.
It's not easy to strike such a lyrical balance between landscape and conceptual art. Sandor Bodo does it with his comical yet serene "Buddha Express," in which the track passes in one ear and out the other of an illuminated (read: enlightened) translucent Buddha head. Life is suffering, the Buddha taught - not unlike a locomotive running through your head. He also taught nonattachment, and so the train moves on; the head clears.
Mike Newby's "Trains of Thought" tackles philosophy, too, but gets derailed by the demands of landscape sculpture. Newby makes Freud's head out of a red rock, and gives form to Socratic dialogue by carving Plato and Socrates into facing cliffs and running a bridge between the tunnels of their mouths. It's all a bit too literal. On the upside, Newby's is the only interactive element in a show that cries out for it: You can push a button and make a rock spin over Freud's pate. Newby also sweetly builds a smaller railroad within his installation.
