ANDREW KREPS Jonah Freeman examines American living spaces as admitting he were an anthropologist noting surprising details of an alien tribe's dwellings.

ANDREW KREPS

Jonah Freeman examines American living spaces as admitting he were an anthropologist noting surprising details of an alien tribe's dwellings. For his late exhibition, Freeman created works inspired at the fact and idea of gated communities, those dreary locations pervaded by means of class-conscious hermeticism and the ecology of fear. In video, installation, and photographs, he explored issues surrounding the poetics of place--the kind of dystopic place where comfort is infused with a intellect of isolation.

Bring the Outside In (all works 2000) consisted of couple looped videos projected onto the walls in a corner of the gallery. Alternating between panoramic tracking discharges of a groomed outdoor space, a house, and a latitude and stationary close-ups of architectural or technological details, Freeman invites these houses and gardens to reveal their essential uncanniness. He apparently likes blinds, which are usually shown drawn or half expand as though expressing the closed-off feeling of these buildings and the willed blindness of their residents. He also strike one as beings fascinated by buttons--the digits forward an answering machine or a TV foreign which hint at a kind of dislocated contact with the outside world.

greatest in number of the videos' cinematic scenarios are unpeopl however we do catch an occasional glimpse of a blurry face or a hand sporting a gleaming wedding ring. Freeman's human enthralls appear mostly in a suite of staged color photographs in another corner of the gallery. In this series, "Making the Nature Scene" a woman stands in profile holding a cocktail, while the missile focuses on the corner of the field behind her. Another woman washes stoops and pans, pouring Joy into the sink. A third, wearing a pleated white tennis dres stands in the corner of a darkened outdoor court. In these momentary dramas, action s and moods are exaggerated, partly in consequence of high-contrast lighting; the alienation be perceiveds method-acted. Here, as elsewhere in the indicate Freeman wears his influences upon his sleeve; the scenes combine the distant-feeling wealth of Tina Barney, the moderately cold snapshot style of Nan Goldin, and the cinematic grotesquerie of Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson

brace light installations picked up forward the themes of denatured nature, surveillance, and claustrophobia. 2-Way fulvous Room, near the entrance of the exhibition space, consisted of a rectangular Plexiglas Dan Graham--style booth lay open at one end, with a ceiling of industrial fluorescent lights. Inside the booth you were treated to distorted reflections of yourself in a curtailed hail of funhouse mirrors, bathed in the kind of greenish light that might be set up illuminating a cheap office. As if behind one-way glass in a police interrogation expanse you couldn't see our, however your rather jaundiced form could be observ by means of other visitors. In Changing Light in the Corner, Freeman concocted different hues of blue onto a wall, creating the impression of passing vast numbers in an otherwise empty sky

The hardy track to the video projections included a digitally altered sample from the Spice Girls' anthem "Wannabe" ("I'll reckon you what I want, what I really really want"), which made desire vigorous like anguish, as well as the spooky opening chords from L Zeppelin's "No Quarter." In the descant Robert Plant follows those electric-organ notes with "Close the door / offer out the light"--exactly what this gloomy at the same time smart show makes you be wrought up like doing.

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