brant SIKKEMA Rachel Berwick's art is haunted by dint of extinction.

brant SIKKEMA

Rachel Berwick's art is haunted by dint of extinction. For previous exhibitions she has cast animal death masks in amber and taught parrots a cancelled Amazonian language. In her chiefly recent show, "Hovering Close to Zero" Berwick focused forward the Tasmanian tiger, a creature that survives no other than in a few bones and in a sixty-second film made in the '20 documenting the disappearing beast. The exhibition consisted of stills from the film, a series of computer-aided forensic re-creations of the tiger in resin, and a assemblage of crystal models cast from tigers' skulls

Berwick approaches questions of los collection, and recollection in part end the lens of scientific knowledge. For the resin carved works (the "Stills" series; all works 2000) she scanned images from the film into a computer which then built up forms using a complicated stereolithographic layering technique, ultimately setting the sculptural "tigers" within gridlike patterns, as if to emphasize their status as specimens to be studied. The works in the "Crystal Skull" series relied in succession a more immediate process, simply casting tiger brains (which, as pieces belonging to a natural history museum, were themselves control to codification) in crystal, a material many times supposed to have magical, curative properties. The resin chisels were nor particularly visually appealing; they considered a bit like aging Eva Hesse studies. reciprocally the skulls looked almost too capital in their smooth, clear shapeliness; you might initially think you could find something similar in a SoHo store specializing in provocative p aperweights. nevertheless the more one looked at the work, the more individual realized that all these distinct forms of representation--scientific, filmic, artistic--are just that, representations. None of them can resuscitate the one time living, now extinct animal. Indeed, not level an exact, life-size replica of a creature can bear witness to its carnal and spiritual mien And in Berwick's case there is another factor that separates the art from its subject: The same "modernity" that enables such precise re-creation of the tiger is what wiped disclosed the species in the first place. Her work thus becomes a testament to a kind of failure, on the other hand a necessary, important one: the failure of memorialization.

It is because Berwick for a like reason intelligently investigates the different temporalities of commemoration--and thus of history--that her art takes forward the properties of a haunting: Her pieces invoke something that is not exactly existing or absent, neither precisely here (now) nor there (then). They hold a liminal zone, a state of hovering in-betweenness, in which time is revealed of joint and unfinished business waits in limbo. If art is in about way still inclined to secure something of the past and at hand for the future, Berwick deflects our attention to the complexities of that function as well as its relation to science, to ritual, and level (bearing in mind the associations of crystal) to magic. Moreover, if we consider what it means to forfeit something irretrievably, to recognize that all attempts to bring back that which was are doomed to fail, the work also resonates with more personal, viscerally felt questions. Despite the desire to repair what was lost, the viewer (like the trauma survivor or scorned lover) is le ft barely with incomplete traces--or, more precisely, retreating tiger tracks.

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