Mario M. Muller

Two one-person exhibitions at adjacent Wooster Street galleries share similar ambitions and tactical approaches to artistic production. Daniella Dooling at Anna Kustera Gallery and Holly Zausner at Caren Golden Fine Art both express themselves in a variety of media. In cast resin (Dooling), cast rubber (Zausner), neon (Zausner), video (Dooling), altered clothing (Dooling), painted Sculpty (Zausner), and photography (both), thee two artists exhibit a restless involvement with materials.

Any artist who works in this multi-media mode is relying on two primary objectives: the first is that the thematic choice is strong enough to bind the disparate mediums into a cohesive whole. The second is the requirement that dissimilar media should engage in a dialogue when exhibited together. The various media should become vocabulary and their effect on one another and arrangement solicit a syntactical structure. Markus Raetz, Gerhard Richter, Rosemarie Trockel and Rebecca Horn each demonstrate an ability to synthesize diverse artistic endeavors. At its most ambitious and successful, an exhibition has the narrative potential to equal any chapter by Thomas Mann, paragraph by Donald Barthleme or line by poet Basho.

The Anna Kustera Gallery is easily one of the best and most quixotic exhibition spaces in town. A long narrow hallway leads to an inviting, sky lit, split-level space. The two floors, open to each other yet distinct, allow for concurrent on-person shows, or as in Daniella Dooling’ case, an exhibition in two acts.

A video, four cast resin wall sculptures and a large scale photograph are the assembled act one. The video, Wardwalk, is the immediate commands attention. In seven-and-a-half minutes, Ms. Dooling emerges from an ambulance and is escorted by two paramedics past a bevy of flashing paparazzi into Bellevue Hospital. Once inside, she sheds a blue shawl to reveal that she’s wearing a dress festooned with thousands of fake fingernails. In the large square photograph to the right of the video monitor, Dooling is again in situ at Bellevue crouching before a gurney, her arm half raised. The dress’s detail, while not immediately apparent in the video, is finely documented in the photograph.

Accompanied by a downright catchy, sitar-laden musical track, Dooling in fingernail dress poses and languidly amble the halls and rooms of Bellevue. The moving camera, with flourishes of slow motion and purposeful distortion, adds a hallucinogenic aura to the work. Dooling’s consistent expressionless visage and hands-on hips demeanor are both parody and pantomime of the fashion catwalk that signal every new season of haute couture.

(continued on page 2)