COTTER, HOLLAND-- THE NEW YORK TIMES
Nina Levy at Eyewash at Holland Tunnel
Friday, March 8, 2002
As far as I know, Holland Tunnel is the
city's smallest gallery open to the public: it's housed in a gardening
shed in a Brooklyn backyard. At the moment, though, it holds something
unusually large, a single sculpture of a human body that fills the
gallery itself and sits on its roof.
The outdoor section shows the head and torso of
a figure dressed in a black leather jacket and a baseball cap, arms
folded as if in hunkered-down defiance or for protection against the
cold. The figure is revealed to be female by the super-realist rendering
of the lower body standing nude inside the shed.
The female colossus has contemporary
precedents, among them Charles Ray's towering fashion mannequins, which
add up to a joke about the intimidating nature of a certain kind of
female glamour. But Ms. Levy, like Lewis Carroll's Alice, makes the idea
of a giant growth spurt entirely her own. Her sculpture is a head-to-toe
self-portrait, clothed and in control above, exposed and vulnerable
below. Whether the piece is about extreme self-confidence or profound
self-consciousness is hard to say. It is certainly some kind of
sculptural tour de force.
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