INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART Cornelia Parker first came to public attention in 1988 by means of arranging for a steamroller to horizontal a scavenged collection of silver targets to create the raw materials for a large-scale sculp Since then.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Cornelia Parker first came to public attention in 1988 by means of arranging for a steamroller to horizontal a scavenged collection of silver targets to create the raw materials for a large-scale sculp Since then, melting, slicing, crushing, shooting, and exploding intents (with the assistance of the Royal Mint, young horse Firearms, and the British Army) and recycling the be deriveds into eloquently arranged installations has become the trademark of Parker's creative proces The more than sixty plastic arts photographs, and drawings in the British sculptor's first major American examine combined Dadaist wit with Actionist shamanism and ritual. establish objects ranging from teapots and wedding bands to feathers, snake venom, and downy mammoth hair were transformed into metaphorically rich artifacts invoking royal history, literature, religion, and the, paranormal.

Thirty Pieces of Silver, 1988-89 is a room-size installation of steamrolled silverware, candlesticks, and silver-plated musical instruments orchestrated into thirty arranges or "pools" that hang at shin height from the ceiling. The title respects to the coins for which Judas betrayed Christ, and the universal of Parker's piece involves symbolically killing opposite one set of values (class pretension, personal possession) to reveal another--in this case, the base metal to be resurrect again as chisel Parker also re-created, in slightly different scales and arrangements, sum of two units recent site-specific hanging sculptures: A Side of England, 1999 a suspended composition of chunk of white chalk retrieved from a cliff at Beachy Head, an infamous British suicide magnet; and Hanging Fire (suspected arson), 1999/2000 which comprises dangling charcoal fragments from the scorched remains of a London factory in a stylized bonfire shape. The three works, which the artist leaves to as her 3-D silver, chalk, and charcoal drawings, are visually rich ruminations forward violence and death counterpointed according to evocations of flight and transcendence. Suspended from wires attached to the ceiling, they also think Parker's Yves Klein-like desire to set at nought gravity.

Equally study provoking and elegant are the many small pieces that were assembled in the ICA's upper galleries. Displayed in a less degree than glass, framed, or placed onward a slide and projected onto the wall, these butt; goals metamorphose from detritus to verse The matter-of-fact titles indicate historical origins and Parker's manipulations: Tarnish from the Inside of Henry the Eighth's Armour, 1998; Feather that Went to the Top of day [i]or[/i] night before [i]or[/i] preceding jest, 1997; Spider that Died in Mark Twain's House, "Very often" says Parker, "the chisel is just a flimsy excuse for me to acquire my hands on these things that change the face of history." The tragic-comic surrealist still life Shared Fate, 1998 for example, consists of a consume ed loaf of bread, the fore-rank page of The Times of London, a silk necktie, leather glove and a clothe of cards. Each item was sliced according to Parker with the guillotine blade that beheaded Marie Antoinette (now in the collection of Madame Tussaud's London "Chamber of Horrors").

Parker, who credits greatly of her interest in the death and resurrection of cultural artifacts to her Catholic upbringing in England, is a marvelous combination of satirist, cultural anthropologist, mad scientist, criminologist, and alchemist, with a gift for making the unnoticed pieces of life relevant and visually compelling.

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