Eve Andree Laramee at TZ'Art & Co - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

At first glance, you'd think that Eve Andree Laramee's installation Apparatus for the Distillation of Vague Intuitions belongs more in a laboratory than in an art gallery. The work sprawls across a 20-foot-long table like a vast biochemical workshop. It includes an array of glass vials and beakers and crablike metal clamping devices; these are set between trays of brilliant aquamarine crystalline solutions and various plants hooked up to electrical wires. But although she consciously adopts the accoutrements of the lab for her own esthetic inquiry, Laramee's work is, if anything, an eloquent refutation of science's self-proclaimed objectivity.

Beginning with the installation's title, Laramee gleefully subverts scientific claims to authority and instead celebrates human fallibility. For instance, in one unit within the larger sprawl, there is a series of glass beakers etched with statements of doubt and faith, such as "Matter of Chance" and "Leap in the Dark." Elsewhere, large chips of mica suspended from a rod are inscribed with words which similarly invoke concepts that undermine scientific authority: "Haziness," "Indecisiveness," "Misinterpretation."

If these small fragments of text provide the most explicit enunciation of Laramee's philosophy, the work itself is visually dazzling and often quite lyrical. As in many of her previous pieces, Apparatus ... includes weak but theoretically functional batteries made with plants and leaves (such as glorious ginger-root stalks and flowering anthuriums) wrapped in copper wire among the myriad test tubes.

The implicit sexual imagery of this kinky techno-natural intercourse is magnified in the chemistry-set couplings of the beakers. Much of the glassware in the installation was hand-blown during the artist's residence at the Experimental Glass Workshop in Brooklyn; the work features bulbous basins and elongated prongs, often poking into each other or dribbling liquids, sometimes leaving crystalline spills beneath. More literal testaments to human passion include little cast-metal hearts encrusted with rust crystals in a glass tray.

The tacit empathy for nature in Laramee's work is demonstrated in one of three pieces shown in addition to the installation: a copper virtual-reality glove that is wired to a leaf. In the end, what at first looked like an exhibition informed by cool rationalism was revealed to be the very opposite. Apparatus . . . reminds us that the human brain itself is merely an intricate chemistry set. It's a provocative message, which Laramee delivers with surprising zest.

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