FRANK BENSON, ELLIOTT HUNDLEY, MATT JOHNSON / “Threedimetrical”

If it's divine intervention you're waiting for, you might well consider an armrest to prop up your Phone Home pose as you superglue your finger to redial. It's rare these days to find the kind of cleavage in the clouds that lets Olympian sparks through the airbrushed heavens. But diffraction… Diffraction we can do. The three artists represented in “Threedimetrical” have their various fingers deftly planted on a dizzying array of diffracted celestial emanations. This exhibition, a sampling of their collective discoveries, astounds. The gathering of work presents a mesmerizing panoply, a host of inspired observations of our wrinkled realities and contorted fantasies. Each of these distinct minds has dialed into a discreet vision. Probing the ambient pollutions and mutations of our apparatuses of biology and perception, their inimitable conclusions are materializing before our eyes.

Frank Benson practices a masterful taxidermy with phantoms of transgression. His elegant sculptures channel the disturbingly focused vandalism of a hypothetical nihilist. Yet, the implied sadism of his transfigured trophies is absolved by the delicacy of their recreation; their material intelligence supercedes the ugliness of their psychic origins. Benson's clipped and literally disembodied specimens offer the bare minimum of evidence necessary to indict the maker's conscience, as our involuntary moral barometers begin to twitch into life. The mere sight of his creatures' bereft husks and high-fructose asphyxiation might even prompt an urge in the most intemperate viewer to place an anonymous tip with the World Wildlife Federation, so convincing is their execution. There is an inarguable whiff of scandal in Benson's image-objects, yet their resolution is delectable and coolly quiescent.

Elliott Hundley delivers us from the bonds of gravity, as he jettisons our loose lids into an overflowing melee of composite constellations and dueling demiurges. The vast locales of Hundley's collaged paintings seem almost directly dreamt into Being, as they churn and bristle with the primordial furor of newly born planets. His material repertoire suggests a hypnotic command of all things tangible, as the detritus of contemporary life collapses magnetized on his surfaces and is reborn, geologic and unfamiliar. And as these exploded, baroque environs take shape and dissolve ad infinitum, a cast of oddly romantic wraiths begins tentatively to emerge. Hundley's wan figures recall a vaguely Byzantine pictorial sensibility, in their levitating conglomerations and ascetic wanderings. Here are flocks of genetic Argonauts, adrift in cellular disarray, bearing witness to the copious differentiations and erratic splendor of a ceaselessly shuddering Big Bang.

Matt Johnson invites us to join him in his perusal of the inexhaustible pleasures of idle exultation. Leaving no stone unturned, Johnson's proposal that we bid farewell to our highfalutin notions of intellectual grandeur in service of uproarious, immutable simplicities and perceptual phenomena is a difficult one to resist. His undeniably appealing sculptures present as the miscegenation of the crudely obvious and the bitingly clever, and are guaranteed to chisel a smile onto even the most impenetrably dull face. And though the strings dangling from Johnson's sleight of hand are quite visible, as he turns to the crowd with a wink and a daub at his nearly unfettered false mustache, one can't help but delight in the glory of his game; because just as the joke begins to unravel, our smug presumptions are defenestrated by the sheer brilliance of the objects which he has conjured for his-and our — amusement. Perhaps the truest measure of Johnson's skill is the ease with which he releases the inanimate from its stiffly mundane cage, breezily facilitating metamorphoses that are clearly begging to occur as crowbars take flight and orange peels grow trunks.

“Threedimetrical” throws open the saloon doors of visual consciousness and briskly digs in its spurs. And beyond a shadow of a doubt, it will leave you scratching your head, though not too hard, silently hoping that the radiant reverberations and sublime whispers won't leak out.

Erik Nils Frydenborg
September 8, 2003