21 Oct 2018

Pooneh Maghazehe: Double Zero

17Essex

Reviewed by William Corwin

Pooneh Maghazehe's sculptures represent punctuated moments along a hazy narrative path about which the viewer can only guess. Her painted plaster and resin casts undulate with the heads of crows, goats, and and other beasts. Twins, doppelgängers, multiples, erasures, and dismemberments are captured at various points in the artist's complicated casting process.

Like a classical altarpiece - Pergamon springs to mind, with its over-the-top drama wedged within neat entablatures - the gestural pieces of "Double Zero" are carefully balanced within self-contained, muted, sleek architectures crafted by the artist. The casts writhe and tantalize, perched on rectilinear steel and wood planks cantilevered off of plinths and held in place by colorful ceiling jacks. The tension with which these mythic assemblages are inserted into the dainty gallery gives them an energy that implies that they can reconfigure themselves, and perhaps shift position or location at any time.