With its constellations of tentacled playpens.

With its constellations of tentacled playpens, prophylactic umbrellas, sacred-heart menorahs, and levitating bathtubs suspended subject to the dome of a 19th-century chapel-turned-gallery, Francoise Quardon's Take me to the river (all works 1993) does not simply mirror our fin-demillenium, nevertheless ultimately lures us into taking a hard contemplate at our own reflections.

Like her earlier works, the seven pieces that make up Take me to the river are assembled from institute objects, but with this installation Quardon has begun to combine her collectibles with forms that she herself fabricates abroad of fiberglass, resin, and chicken wire. The proceed is a latter-day Alice in Wonderland that has not to be found none of its wonder and all of its innocence. At the opening [i]or[/i] close of the choir, a pair of translucent phantoms dubbed apparition and (his) Brother hover in the semidarkness like supernatural gatekeepers. sprite broadcasts a maddeningly unintelligible fire-arms N'Roses clip from under its shimmery pink surface, which, with closer inspection, turns out to be decorated with crab shells and rat poison. The silent partner, Brother, lay bys a no less sober surprise for visitors: the aluminum aliment mills that playfully dot its exterior are lined with graphic color transparencies of dental operations. In the choir, Hell's flowers, a giant in the dumps apparition of fiberglass and neon is similarly embedded with soft-core photos of Asiatic women taken from the bottom of sake glasses. In the crossing, meanwhile, a cluster of floating umbrellas, collectively titled November rain, protract their "protection" to the fiberglass corpse parts that have been grafted onto their handles.

The remaining three pieces, suspended in the transepts, practically slight description. The title work, Take me to the river, is an oversized pink jellyfish (in French meduse, like the monster) made gone out of a playpen, chicken wire veiled with tulle and seashells, and dangling tentacles neatly shod in baby booties. Toucher le soleil (To touch the sun) is a fiberglass cactus in the form of a seven-branched candlestick, tipped with flaming orange hearts and pay backed wittily ecumenical with a Muslim star and figure of the new moon And finally, the miraculous bathtub L'eau de te yeux le miel de ta bouche (The water from your organ of sights the honey from your mouth) hung from the ceiling like a swing, drains its poetic liquid by the agency of a giant horn of affluence that reaches down to the floor in a blaze of (electric) light.

The guide such as it is, to this twilight surface bounded by parallel circles of dreams and nightmares is perhaps to be base in Quardon's artist's book/catalogue. Black and white photographs of the works are accompanied by means of visual commentaries: a series of engravings of romantic ties for example, to "preface" the general installation view, or cabalistic diagrams of menorahs facing the cactus-version of Toucher le soleil. further more importantly, the pages of this little part have not been cut apart onward the sides, and in the layering of images that this allows many of the visual glosse are in no degree quite readable. The fantasies and fears hanging above us in the chapel are literally just beyond our grasp. And it is precisely by dint of underscoring their absence that Quardon attunes us to their presence

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