Colleen Asper - The Trial
October 4 – November 14, 2007
Reception: Thursday, October 4th, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
In The Trial, Colleen Asper's show in the project room at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, the New York-based painter has produced an existential mystery in which the architecture, ceremony and rituals of a court trial are rendered in soft, otherworldly photorealist tones while the nature of the crime and the circumstances of the trial are conspicuously left out.
In Franz Kafka's iconic novel of the same name, the narrator Josef K can never discover the details to a crime of which he is accused and convicted. In Asper's Trial, it is the viewer who's left in the dark. In a series of carefully wrought watercolors and a single oil, details of a court proceeding mysteriously unfold. Flags are flown. Oaths are taken. Testimony is given. Evidence is discussed. The scenes and the actors are familiar--if not from life then at least from television—but there is something elusive and impenetrable about them. They provoke anxiety, demand interpretation and ultimately come to feel ominous in an era of government wiretapping and secret trials.
The negative space in Asper's narrative alerts the viewer to the trial's inability to sustain its own reality without the consensus of an audience, and thus provokes us to question our faith in the trial process as, at bottom, a simple pursuit of truth and justice. It also invites the viewer to reflect on the role of the artist as witness. Asper's practice is designed not just to question the reality of powerful cultural constructions, but also draw back the curtain on the work of the artificer in granting that reality to it. The sheer fact of its being painted as opposed to its being photographed or filmed, and the deployment of "stars" from well-known past trials works to confuse reportage with entertainment and verisimilitude with invention.