DEREK ELLER GALLERY D-L Alvarez thinks like a writer.

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

D-L Alvarez thinks like a writer. Each piece segue into the nearest like chapters in an evocative if it were not that fragmentary novel, weaving non-narrative stories that hum with human presence but in which no human appears. Alvarez's personal vocabulary consigns to the natural world and its uneasy infiltration of the urban environment. yet the trees, spider-webs, and parks of "Sculpture Garden," his next to the first solo exhibition in New York, had as often or as little, to do with nature as a fairy tale has with fairies. somewhat cold almost simple on the surface, the innocent images and targets in the show seemed to have absorbed and given shape to a mournful humor, a macabre eroticism, abject desire, and confusion.

The present to view began with Remnant (from action), 2000 a ten-foot-tall dead sapling suspended upside down from the ceiling in the same manner that its twig tips grazed the floor. The stalk and branches had been wrapped with sewn strips of what awaited like heavy silk, torn from a suit coat Alvarez formerly wore in a performance. Costum and bandaged in the shimmery clergymen the hanged tree was almost painfully anthropomorphic, although the purple-gray material also read as bark or evening light. Sometimes, perhaps, a tree is just a tree

further usually it's not. The tree in Map, Sites, and Diagram (all 2000) were crisply, almost naively illustrated, still each evinced a sublimated violence and longing, as if they stood as witnesses to invisible dramas. A frieze of small pencil drawings sutur with tape, Sites flirted with bucolic cliche, moreover veered ineluctably toward strangeness. The wall drawing Diagram doubled into Rorschach abstraction, unless resolved into a figure suspended in a web of branches. Map, meanwhile, was an example of the blue-penciled, paint-by-number-style drawings Alvarez has been making for a certain time. Instead of colors, the numbered spaces correspond to fragments of passage appended to the gothic forest spectacle Alvarez wrote most of these; the others derive from literary sources, notably Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the teen-angst novels of SE Hinton. Matching statements with visual passages, the viewer implemented a low-tech hypertext allusive and amorphously disturbing: "Cigarette marks and spent condoms littered the path"; "Thus strangely are our minds constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we spring to prosperity or ruin."

The "strange constructions" and "slight ligaments" of imagined narrative also shaped Documentary Footage and prototype (both 2000). Concealed inside a two-inch cave in the wall, a tiny protection displayed the black-and-white video Documentary Footage--a static, frontal ball of an empty park bench. cross to another shot of a different bench; after that another and another. Whatever ill-tempered excitement had been generated according to the peephole intimacy dissipated to lyric melancholy as it became clear that no visitors would to the end of time arrive.

Model shared this atmosphere of the latent or nonencounter. The chisel consisted of four identical architectural patterns of a national park-style bathroom building, each in its acknowledge Plexiglas box cantilevered from the wall. The familiar pitched vault rustic siding, and separate entrances forward opposite corners were unmistakable, although the buildings also recalled the ubiquitous cottages in the forests of fairy tales. What appointment s or stalkings might be enacted here? Like Documentary Footage, archetype raised such questions only to challenge them with intentional monotony. Just as the park benches remained without contents the miniature buildings refused to divulge their retired stories. As did the quiet of "Sculpture Garden," Model evok a meeting point between setting and conclusion object and fantasy. In this unstable, ultimately fictive realm, the imagination confronts--but cannot requite, or flat fully understand--its own abject desires.

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