(Below is the article which appeared in the Buffalo Voice
describing the show which was entitled "White Men in Suits".)

White Men in Suits 

by Donna Carlson 

White Men in Suits, a group exhibition of twelve artists from the United States and Canada, is on view at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center through December 11th. The exhibition explores the business suit as a contemporary symbol of corporate and political power, most frequently appearing on the white male. Two artists' works lend three-dimensionality to the show. The exhibition begins and ends with Christopher Engle’s 1993 installation Get to Know Your CEO, which runs like a ticker tape around the main room. An $86-million-dollar-a-year CEO of Coca-Cola holds a single employee in the palm of his giant, encompassing hand. Small, computerized images of the average worker, each earning an average of $19,000 per year, form the ticker tape that leads from the introductory label to the final graph depicting the immense discrepancies between the workers and the "suits." The CEO’s eyes are blanked out with a black rectangle like an image in a pornographic magazine, but this economic porn is indicated by the letters "CEO" on the rectangle. Engle says that although the figures he uses are available to the public in sources from the U.S. Treasury, Department of Labor, and Congressional Record, he doubts the documents' ability to convey their social message. Engle’s purpose in this and other works is to let the facts graphically speak for themselves. Brian Conley's Ascension attracts the viewers' hands as well as the eyes. Ascension relates consumption to obsession with money. A mass of stuffed clothing, plastic bottles, and refuse rises from a wall of shredded money, the violent resurrection of a powerful god. Painting is represented by two women artists. Nashville artist Barbara Bullock's philosophy that "We ARE art" is embodied in her six pieces in the exhibition. She uses vivid, surreal imagery, bold colors, and satire to explore black-white relationships. In Tasters Choice, a black woman sips coffee while one man hangs by his hands behind her, another hangs by his feet, and a third lies hog-tied at her feet. All wear at least part of a business suit. Another work, a kind of reverse of Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom in form and content, explores the general concept of power through the mutual destruction of animal species. Man, the most powerful animal, tops the heap. Ann Chamberlin says of her painting, "We are awkward and vainglorious people." Her four small, powerful pieces convey her message with satirical humor. The flat angularity of her figures, their lonely solitude even when in groups, is reminiscent of Ben Shahn's early social realism. Like Shahn, Chamberlin criticizes society, particularly the moneyed and powerful, which she symbolizes with backgrounds of gold leaf, aluminum, hues of green and, of course, men in suits. Her poignant Ex-President on His Terrace depicts a sadly contemplative, purply man in a blue suit with his back to the viewer. Looking slightly to the right at nothing, his hands behind his neck, he stands with his thumbs tied gently together with a thin string; helpless and powerless, yet still in his blue suit. Chamberlin's work is among the most powerful in the exhibition. Kelly McFadden's What We Do Is Secret is an eight-panel computer-generated series of images, distorted in their enlargement, reminiscent of 1950s subliminal messages sent over television and movie screens. The panels, grouped in four on opposite ends of the room, begin with What we do is subvert as a man peers ironically over his coffee cup, a symbol of friendship. On the opposite wall, the final panel, What we do is blind, shows a man laughing and cheering, blindly unaware of the subversion of his colleague in this subliminal spatial conversation. The exhibition includes three artists who deal, in some way, with textile arts. Robin Kahn combines meticulous embroidery with fabrics such as gold lame, pinstriped seersucker, and flannel suiting to tease men about a cultural symbol of last virility, baldness. In Silver Vanity, 1991, she demonstrates four stages of balding in five balding patterns and in Suit Triptych-Young Head, Aging Head, Aged Head, 1991, the embroidered balding increases on each panel of fabric. In Wall Street, 1988, Barbara Todd creates a quilt of cutout photographs of men in business suits. She claims that the suit does not call attention to the body or to itself as women’s fashion does, but frames the face, giving authority to the 'talking head.' Todd discovered through her own photographs that crumpled or disheveled suits render people more human than they normally appear in magazines. It’s this humanity that she captures in her 132-man quilt. Lesley Dill's engaging Poem Hairsuit and Poem Suits carry an impact inversely proportional to their small size. She says of her work, "Sometimes I feel skinless... For me words are an intervening armor between ourselves and the world... particularly... the words of Emily Dickinson... To look inside your closet and find the proper fit... and coat your vulnerability with a shell of surrogacy." Dill constructs suits and dresses from paper, then covers them with Dickinson's words. Poem Hairsuit is a rice paper textual suit conveying the poem 'A World made Flesh is seldom And tremblingly partook...' Stitched with long strands of horsehair, the image resembles a hirsute male body. Lyricism in the stitching and flow of the horsehair match the rhythm of Dickinson's words and the fiber of Dill's designs. Poem Suits is ten small suits with arms in various positions; "A single screw of Flesh is all that pins the Soul" is written on six, on the three smallest suits, only "SOUL" is written, and one small suit says only "SCREW." These are business suits of the powerful in all their vulnerability. Elden Garnet also works in small scale. Featured in the exhibition are five bronze sculptures of solitary men in business suits; one on an island; one struggling against the wind, coattails flying, on top of an obelisk; one talking to a sheep on a steeped pyramid; one carrying a briefcase walking on a slanted conics form; and one hidden, covered, inside a square. Garnet’s men in suits speak to us of powerlessness and loneliness in the modern world, while expressing their humanity and frailty. White Men in Suits is an exhibition of great variety in both style and substance. It is about power, about the business suit as an emblem of power. This exhibition is far more than a collection of familiar parrots at what used to be called "the establishment." The exhibition forces us to question what constitutes power, to examine the loneliness and solitude that power brings, yet recognize power’s dangers. It's well worth seeing.

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