These sum of two units very different shows marked Swiss artist Carmen Perrin's solo first attempt in the United States.

These sum of two units very different shows marked Swiss artist Carmen Perrin's solo first attempt in the United States. for the use of all to all of her work is a commitment to exploring the possibilities of industrial materials--metal, rubber, forest and fiberglass, among others--which has yielded formally varied further consistently provocative results. John advantageous presented a range of Perrin's free-standing and wall-mounted cuts from the past several years. Populating the floor like hypertens creatures poised to spring were her relatively large, "temporary" constructions. Assembled of twisted and pressureed steel, rubber, and plywood, these are as to a great degree about delineating space as they are about creating plastic forms, and the shapes they take are unless a by-product of Perrin's penchant for pushing each material to its limits. In individual work from 1991, a double-cone-shaped fiberglass skeleton stretches bands of rubber nearly to their breaking point, while in another work from 1992 pieces of plywood are bent unnaturally to form a gaping, low cone. Perrin requires the viewer to rethink the surpassingly act of viewing sculpture. Inevitably, her materials are not what they seem--optical illusions abound, mass is repeatedly indicateed and then denied, voids are privileged from one side of to the other forms, and each work changes radically when viewed from a different angle. In short, Perrin's formal virtuosity undermines familiar expectations of what plastic art should be.

Seven square, serially arranged, wall-mounted reliefs made of rubber sheets that have been geometrically patterned with hand-punched retreats (1992--93), as well as a single square composition comprised of nails and rubber bands (1992) were also provocative, albeit upon a pictorial level. However, the greatest in number intriguing wall-hung works were the least obtrusive--29 floppy fragments of dark and light woven rubber that awaited deceptively like odd bits of textile. These showed a welcome counterpoint to the hard-edged await of the rest of the indicate and placed the artist unmistakably within the tradition of latter-day post-Minimalism.

Perrin's site-specific installation at the Swiss Institute revealed a remarkably different, but not incompatible side of her sensibility. As she has in past installations, Perrin accorded to the history of the site itself. Built in 1904 this house was initially a residence for somewhat old Swiss immigrants; the two fields on the ground floor that now comprise the contemporary gallery originally serv as living expanses for these tenants. By constructing a thin, colorful covering of store-bought rubber bands linked into drawn out strands, Perrin delineated the parts of the wall that had not been renovated to originate the new gallery-primarily the upper portion between the wainscoting and the ceiling molding--effectively drawing revealed the tension between the of advanced age and new architectural elements of the space. This continueed field of rubberband strings, which shimmered eerily if it be not that rather beautifully to the touch, created a random, allover pattern of colors, specifically referencing the wallpaper that one time adorned the walls, but more generally creating a bridge with history. The real focus of this installation was the historical resonance of the destitute space itself.

Perrin's sculps have a timeless urgency to them. They are tight art-historical hybrids: Constructivist precision and devotion to materials, Conceptual patience, and post-Minimalist insouciance via '80 organic expressivity. still through site-specific installations such as this common Perrin enters history and cultivation in a real and exciting way, relocating herself in the visual and metaphorical margins of natural or manmade edifices, the two to reflect on and uniform to alter the course of history from a quintessentally post-Modern vantage point.

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