Bas-Relief Abstractions Give New Form to Human Emotions

Jeanne Silverthorne’s sprawling new exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery revolves around two seemingly mechanical apparatuses--a Fear Machine and a Tear Machine (both 2002)--that are connected by pipes to several thick picture frames, all black.

Within each frame, as though pumped in from a central source, a waxy, parchment-colored substance appears frozen into a series of organic bas-relief abstractions resembling (and in some cases representing) microscopic views of the human body.

With all of the cords, plugs and switches that these contraptions entail, one expects some sort of electrical output--movement, sound or a projection, perhaps--but in fact the entire system is made from cast rubber.

Upon close inspection, the gears, cranks, knobs and joints are stiff, clotted with sloppy black paint and conspicuously useless.

Thus relieved of any functional obligation, the work reveals itself to be surprisingly, and somewhat hauntingly, human. In this light, the machines come to seem rather intimate, like models of a stranger’s internal organs.

The relief works read like materialized emotions. In previous exhibitions, Silverthorne has titled similar works with a tone of gritty scientific literalism--Sweat Pore, for example, or Ulcer, Bacteria Promoting--but here they’re called Dry Mouth (2002), Thin-Skinned (2000), Edgy (2001) and Aching (2001), as if she were reclaiming the sensations they represent from the impersonal rhetoric of science.

They’re fascinating and sculpturally masterful creations: simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, delicate and monstrous. They protrude, crawl, sag and drift with an almost embarrassing compulsion beyond the interior edges of the frame, like flesh that refuses to be politely contained by the walls of an undergarment.

At the physical center of the exhibition, in a tall Plexiglas vitrine, are two small female figures that are cast as reliefs from the same pale rubber. Identical but for the color of their hastily applied hair, they sit with their knees drawn toward their chests, wearing crude but poignant expressions of anxiety. Despite the discrepancy in scale, it’s easy to imagine these figures--surrogates, perhaps, for the artist or viewer--as the vehicles within which the larger emotional engines are continually running, producing the tears and fears that accompany life’s many anxieties.

*

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave. B1, Santa Monica, (310) 453-1595, through March 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.