I've heard good things about "The Wreathmaker," Richard Sudden's 2005 site-specific installation at Whitespace. I wish I had seen that one, because then I might feel better about "For the Waters of Lethe," Sudden's current multimedia installation in the same space. I won't do a comprehensive description of the show--Local Ephemera does an admirable job of that here--but I will point out a few highlights and sore thumbs.

Everything in the show looks good. Sudden's precisely wrought kayak hulls (based on plans he and his brother had ordered in the late 60s) remind me of some of Robert Witherspoon's fabrication intensive sculpture. And a series of mixed media works on braille book pages all have rich, tactile surfaces.


The Secret Language, encaustic on braille paper, 21" x 11"


detail

But I was dogged too often with the sense of showiness from the work, the sense that all of this was designed to look deep and evocative without actually being deep and evocative. The braille pages for example seem to want to suggest weather and age, but are not actually weathered and aged. And so they have the feeling of movie props, designed to seem ancient and spiritual on camera. The video "For the Waters of Lethe" meant to suggest and look like an Ingmar Bergman film, instead was vaguely silly with its putatively Greek goddess walking around in a bed sheet making arm movements that feel like they're lifted from a high school production of Oedipus Rex.


2nd room, installation view. Background: "For the Waters of Lethe"

To be sure, isolated moments were pleasurable and affecting: the pair of kayaks in the second room were understated talismans of grief and longing. And the pair of truly weathered canvases "Memory and Oblivion I" and "Memory and Oblivion II" are onto something important in the post minimalist dialog with their surfaces manipulated by man and nature.

But these moments of direct connection were too often overshadowed by the more surface-oriented elements of the exhibition. A little makeshift shed on the Whitespace grounds is bedecked with symbols originating from a panoply of cultures and belief systems: Ashanti, Rastafarian, Talmudic, numerological, Daoist, Tibetan, old norse, Hindu. The shed, called "Xin's House" was peaceful and lovely in its own way, but the leveling ecumenicalism of it all made it unconvincing either as art or as genuine spirituality. The artist seemed to be asserting that a vague and generalized belief in beliefs adds up to insight. But for me it didn't, any more than a grocery list adds up to a meal. Up through June 21.


Xin's Houseinterior detail


Xin's House, artists revealing secret Rastafarian panel

Like a "high school production of Oedipus Rex."

Here, here! That "acting" was not very good. It could've easily been sounds of the ocean with maybe a just a little (well-done) voice over. That would have been enough.

No need to spell it out for the audience; the video wasn't the main focus of the show.

But I do wanna say that I really liked the rest of the work in the main building. It was just too many ideas...