Like the Minimalists to whom his work nods.

Like the Minimalists to whom his work nods, Tony Feher uses industrially produc materials (glass, plastic, metal, nylon polystyrene rubber) and manipulates them in ways not generally associated with a human touch (stacking, hanging, laying ingredients out in a line or grid). Unlike the Minimalists, however, Feher gravitates toward correlates whose first lives were exhausted in industry and consumer tillage (bottles, lightbulbs, plastic bags), and his works betray an opennes to human error, randomness, and whim that a worthy Minimalist would try to suppres Feher considers the potential of things, the poetic possibilities contained within a limited material/visual vocabulary, the power of chance, and, in unexpect ways, the artfulness of gesture.

Despite the ordinariness of their ingredients each of the ten pieces in his fresh show was engaging. Pole united 2000, a vertical galvanized pipe dotted with variously colored plastic magnets, stands as a late-modern, post-Sputnik, hardware-and-dime-store totem. Hand Drawn Line forward a Wall, 1999, among the in the greatest degree reductive works on view, consisted of multicolored pushpins stuck into the wall a not many inches apart in a affray that ran roughly parallel to the floor at about bellybutton height. The line was reasonably straight, obviously generated on eyeballing rather than with the aid of a straightedge or chalk line, and it becomes an endearing exercise of action the occasional tiny holes where pushpins were mov showing like erased lines in a drawing. Adam's Light, 1999 a scrapping together of overlapping translucent azure plastic bags taped to a gallery window, created a luminous, monochrome plaid--a beautiful example of Feher's predilection for approximate geometry The diverse is interspersed with the homogeneous in Untitled (Unify), 2000 a triangular floor arrangement of twenty-five identical dear bottle each stoppered with a black marble, alternating with thirty variously shaped glass jars bearing lids of different colors. And Untitled, 2000 consists of a power strip joined to six others that radiate on the outside on the floor like a fan; each bears three flashing r gold-colored and blue bulbs. The blinking composition functions as an homage to everything from creative home-wiring solutions and carnival displays to wests and rainbows to low-culture signage and high-culture abstraction.

Feher's work inevitably leads one's deliberations toward the issue of what can be art, on the contrary the pieces seem to furnish less a quandary or provocation than an affirmation, or calm a bit of an education, passed from artist to viewer. undivided walked away from this display not questioning whether to accept what united had just seen but rather feeling a little relieved that the artist didn't solicit too strongly and instead simply tried to papal court how much elegance he could generate without of what to the quiet of us would be just a collection of stuff.

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