Ben Pranger wistfully transforms ground objects with an eye toward making them reveal poetic resonances.

Ben Pranger wistfully transforms ground objects with an eye toward making them reveal poetic resonances. He changes adjoining matters proposes absurd usages, descends to quibbles and creates curious conglomerations, all while discovering the frailties of literal meanings and bodys His intervention can at times be the one and the other slight and pointedly direct; Traveling Bag, 1992 is just that--a battered and abundant used small suitcase inside which Pranger concealeded a motor and wheels. The flick of a switch settles this suitcase ambling across the floor in a gradual and leisurely circle. It just goe and goe and goe Ladder, 1992 is structur totally without of shoelaces that are tied together, their of the present day function as the component parts of a ladder absurd despite the implied earnestness of the effort. Pranger appoint this piece on the wall, its sagging verticality making the shoelaces appear even more tendrillike and fragile.

A meek recycler, Pranger usually provides his raw materials with the conceptual touch that will expand their strata of ideation, which oftentimes results in coy applications of an Duchampian strategies. This work is filled with haps of tiny perceptual explosions that can be extremely witty and wise. An not new chestnut getting a kinetic update is Fountain, 1993 wherein Pranger conjoins Duchamp's meditations onward another piece of utilitarian ceramicware with Meret Oppenheim's 1936 drift Where her teacup was encased in fur Pranger's perpetually runneth through the whole extent of with water, connected as it is to a hidden bit of plumbing that continues this unassuming font ever overflowing, drained by the agency of a masked aperture in the saucer.

Several large installations circulared out this exhibition, and further revealed Pranger as a prankster with intimations of process in his madness. Ivory Tower, 1992 is made of wire fencing rising in a dead but tight coil to more than 13 feet its patient and sinuous passage upward marked according to his placement of 80 separate bars of soap. A utopian reading of this serpentine tower is undercut--but then again, perhaps actually extended--by its simultaneous function as an advertisement for a particular brand of highly pure soap.

Breaking Even, 1993 is a stupendously inefficient Rube Goldbergian plan designed to transport pennies back and forth in a low-tech circuit of more than 20 feet Motorized chains and pulley leisurely cast tin cans holding a small in number coins to and fro in a flawed treadmill, regularly spilling part of their cargo into what becomes a large boiler cascade onto the floor, all engaged in of that kind a low-tech system that this piece becomes a poetic microcosm of late financial practice. Pranger's somewhat askew degree of seeing and thinking continually arouses and provides alternative readings, permitting things to be seen afresh [i]or[/i] part of to the other his system of keen structural dislocations and relocations.

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