Although Sherman is a conceptual artist, "Success & Happiness" has a wonderful formal quality that was missing from her ICA show, which featured lists and diagrams.
For "Brides, horizontal" she has twice blown up a page from a bridal magazine and positioned the brides horizontally, foot to foot. They don't form a mirror - one bride faces up, the other down - but rather constitute one long, twisting stretch of bride. The suite of woodcuts "Brides 1-5" joins white and gray silhouettes of brides at the skirt hem. They verge on complete abstraction, yet edge toward the recognizable. The gray duplicate suggests a shadow or doppelganger - a bride's unspoken wishes.
In another series, the artist tears sheets from bridal magazines and paints over the bride in white enamel. The silhouette becomes a screen for our projections, and Sherman creates a pleasing tension between figure and ground.
There's one series unrelated to weddings: photographs in which, wearing a black cocktail dress, Sherman lies on a variety of sofas, her own and several in furniture stores. They have titles such as "Willow Sofa in Snow," and many sofas feature prominent labels full of ad copy trumpeting, for instance, "a deep, sink-in hospitality."
These are not as disturbingly effective, but as with the brides, the sofa images examine what we want for ourselves and how that is shaped by what we are being sold. None of Sherman's work is a simple critique of advertising. Nor is she calling us out for our naked longing for deep, sink-in hospitality. This work prompts us to shed the trappings of sales and stories and return to the elusive essence of desire as something that reveals us, and keeps us moving forward.
Tiny, striking patterns
"WOWbug & Other Micro-Natures" is a fun, eye-popping, up-close examination of tiny critters at Khaki Gallery. The artists Angela Devenney and Jennifer Formica (whose last name, aptly, is the Latin word for ant) use scanners to magnify images of insects, among other things.
