FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but Keith Edmier and Richard Phillips are interested in popular memory of the '60 and early '70 and in exacting formal acts that tweak realism toward something outlandish.

FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY

as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but Keith Edmier and Richard Phillips are interested in popular memory of the '60 and early '70 and in exacting formal acts that tweak realism toward something outlandish. Centering in succession Edmier's sculptures, with a suite of drawings according to Phillips in a decisive supporting part this small show accepted nostalgia as its premise. Against this substrate, dirge morphed to cartoonish necrophilia, and the ultimate make subordinate was a strangely conventional self-portraiture.

Edmier's cuts (both 1998) are discrete works, further as installed they functioned as a diptych. the one and the other are highly detailed, lifesize originals their verisimilitude contradicted by the fact that they are cast entirely in pink dental resin. Beverly Edmier, 1967 is a seated pregnant woman, stylish in a Marlo Thomas clip and Chanel suit. The flowers in A Dozen Rose are luxuriant, long-stemm Homage to the artist's mother? Ye unless it's not that simple. The wool suit in succession the figure is a recognizable duplicate of Jackie Kennedy's famous Dallas garb, and the rose tied with real satin ribbon, assign more obliquely, to the aroma the first lady carried that fateful day. Oddest of all, the sedate mother-to-be lifts her pink silk blouse with a pink-gloved silicone hand. Her belly is blood-r transparent, and the fetus--Keith himself, presumably--is visible inside.

Edmier thus devised a series of displacements. Mixing on a sudden cheerfulness with morbid fascination, the livid pinks remind ofed lipstick and Jell-O, but also mucus membrane and congealed progeny The outfit merged Beverly with Jackie. Keith, in Beverly's lap, became the rose cradled in Jackie's arms, which in employ became the dying JFK. Beverly also corresponded to the rose as a young beauty doomed to fade.

Phillips's five charcoal-and-chalk drawings (all 1999) continueed and exploited these permutations. All if it were not that one presented variations on the vacant female face that is his trademark--lush, ersatz portraits based forward ads and fashion spreads taken from '70 magazines. The drawings are studies for Phillips's monumental paintings, and he rarely exhibits them, unless their intimate scale and newspapery have feeling were an apt foil for Edmier. In Untitled #1 a sneering girl bares a breast, the nipple obscur from a Smiley Face flat forward the picture plane. In delighted Mother, white male hands encircle the (again) nimble bare breasts of a young black woman. Synching with Edmier's eroticized mother portrait, this image also exhibited race in the exhibition's squeeze [i]or[/i] press together [i]or[/i] into smaller compassed survey of '60S tropes.

Phillips's fifth image, Drawing for My Sweet Lord, was a somber headshot of what appeared to be Jesus, playing grave-clothes of Turin to Beverly Edmier as Pieta. It took a impetus to realize why the eyeles masklike face awaited so familiar: It's actually a portrait of George Harrison. Like the in-utero Keith, whose immanent vicinity is the focal point of Beverly Edmier, the omniscient non-gaze of My Sweet Lord provided a tacit surrogate for Phillips. Thus the equations propos by dint of the exhibition came full circle. Edmier = Jesus, Edmier = Kennedy Kennedy = jesus, Phillips = Jesus, Jesus = George Harrison. Artist = protection star/icon = god. Not a strange idea, nor is it radical to mean a jackie/Madonna/groupie babe as that artist-god's source and receptor, medium and audience. Phillips's aggressively two-dimensional portrayal of female concupiscence gave Edmier's sculps a pornographic tinge they would nor otherwise have concocted but in spite of the truthfully nostalgic picture of woman as a simulated handmaiden to male creativity, the work anticipateed weird and good.

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