Art in Review; Anya Kielar
By Roberta Smith, New York Times
Anya Kielar's first solo show at this gallery was mostly histrionic paint-it-black graduate school art. Her second has traction; it updates aspects of early Dadaist and Surrealist photomontage, collage and assemblage with ad-agency sharpness and feminist, table-turning wit. The works combine flat and dimensional cutout images and found objects in varying ratios.
All depict women, the best with crisp, tangible vehemence that brings to mind Hannah H�ch crossed with Kembra Phaler, the performance artist known for her high black boots and fluorescent body paint. Surrealism is expertly rendered if a bit familiar in four free-form mannequins made of cutouts, bits of furniture and other objects and sometimes lights. ''Automaton'' is neo-Arcimboldo: a life-size figure pieced together from images of butterflies. ''Martha'' is a woman on all fours, whose torso is a three-drawer sewing cabinet that provides a rebellious uprightness.
More original are three large, dark collage-assemblages of crying women arrayed in shallow glass-fronted boxes; they sharply twist the woman-at-the-window motif with which painters have traditionally evoked prostitutes. Titles aside, these women have a totemic power and abstractness. Inside the boxes their various elements, which include paint-on-glass, fabric, net and cut-out paper and photographs, seem aligned but unattached. The subjects are in charge of their own construction in a protected space where movement and liberty seem possible.