Billie Grace Lynn at the Lowe Art Museum

Billie Grace Lynn recently had her first solo museum show at the Lowe Museum of the University of Miami, where she has been teaching since fall 2004. Titled "Uncanny," the exhibition consisted of two bodies of work: large-scale wall pieces called "Tapings" and freestanding interactive sculptures. While the "Tapings" are successful and worthy of consideration, the sculptures are stronger works, captivating and often profoundly moving.

Sculptural reliefs in which silver duct tape covers the entire canvas surface, the "Tapings" have been extensively and painstakingly hand-worked (the artist's fingers often bled) into whirls, rivulets and other patterns. Taping #2 (Labyrinth), 2003, which measures 58 by 84 by 12 inches, presents a network of straight lines at the top that leads to a vortex and protuberance in the Iower half. The image suggests bodily organs on the one hand and a machine on the other, recalling the mechanomorphs of Duchamp and Picabia. A sense of the "uncanny"--the psychic shiver Freud attributed to a confusion of the animate and inanimate-is often expressed in the "Tapings" through the impression of a life force trapped behind gleaming metallic hides.

Lynn's interest in the interface between the body and the machine is even more clearly expressed in her kinetic interactive sculptures. Hand (2005), a prime example of her more poetic and whimsical work, features a beautifully carved, highly detailed blond-wood human hand (the artist's own, complete with wrinkles and scars), suspended palm down in midair. The visitor is invited to gently rub the palm and fingers, an intimate, sensuous act that stimulates the hand and fingers to move in response, thanks to a visible but discreet system of strings and pulleys (it resembles a miniature version of a George Rickey sculpture).

Blackmail (2000), an earlier interactive sculpture, operates on a wholly different level of meaning and experience. Lynn, who is white, was raised in racist surroundings in Louisiana, and created this work as a kind of exorcism in which she would confront and expose her fears about black male sexuality. In this work, the disembodied head of a black man is attached to a structure the artist decribes as a lynching pole. When the viewer grasps and pushes upon a phallic metal rod at the front of the work, his eyes roll backwards, his mouth opens and his tongue protrudes in an invitation to a kiss. This piece thus acts out a savagely racist stereotype that the artist courageously identifies and critiques, the pun of its title pointing to injustice. Powerfully disturbing on many levels, Blackmail is both seductive and physically aggressive despite being quite insubstantial, its complexly engineered system of rods, strings and pulleys delicately swaying in air currents.

Fallen Angel (2000/2005) consists of a 9-inch-tall, gorgeously carved, horned red devil with phallus and large outspread wings (actual bird's wings). When the viewer pulls a metal ring, the devil dances and skips gracefully around the circumference of a round silver table, treading upon a large illuminated Bible (it is opened to Ezekiel) with each circuit. Viewers must circumnavigate the table in tandem with Lucifer to free him if he becomes tangled in the strings, as he occasionally does. The implication seems to be that we are all fallen angels.

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