Little Cockroach Press #12 (1999)

published by Art Metropole in collaboration with Sandy Plotnikoff

Lucy Pullen produces works in a wide-ranging number of media. Drawing, sculpture, photography, and actions are only some of the disciplines she has recently explored. Linking this eclecticism is a practice the artist calls 'conceptual materialism'. Her works are often formally independent of one another, and appear determined from an internal logic that lead to idiosyncratic ends. A strong sense of humour draws Pullen's work together, with an interest in word play, puns, and an adventurous use of technique developing the possibilities of everyday materials.

In an artists' bookwork, Little Cockroach Press #12, (1999) published by Art Metropole, Pullen, in collaboration with artist Sandy Plotnikoff, considered the performative and sculptural possibilities in the vast amount of discarded and secondhand goods on offer in a Value Village thrift store. The two artists took photographs of one another as each donned successively more layers of garments. One photograph, for example, shows Pullen wearing eight turtle neck sweaters; in another she's sporting sixteen baseball hats. The spontaneous and offhand nature of Pullen and Plotnikoff's 'action' retains an impromptu, unrehearsed quality, and as such, the two act not so much as performance artists or even pranksters but as facilitators between ideas and a given set of circumstances.This allows one understanding of the term 'conceptual materialism'. Much of Pullen's work presents evidence of the artist working collaboratively with materials. Pullen consistently finds hidden potential toward unforeseen ends, and manufactures works that invite reception through a spirit of generosity. The viewer is drawn into the nuances and possibilities of objects and ideas through a sense of humour and surprise.

In Sucker (1996), the artist cast a life-sized statue of herself in rock candy, the same material found in a child's sweet. The double entendre and self-mocking humour of the title suggest the artist is at the mercy of forces of which she is acutely aware. While appearing to obey the traditions of heroic portraiture, the work itself is temporary. The first version of this work melted and collapsed, necessitating its remanufacture. The second cracked internally as the candy cooled. Sucker plays with our expectations of monumental sculpture and historical associations of permanence, stability, and achievement. Pullen doesn't so muchundercut these expectations exacererbate them. Sucker is a sculpture, in the 'sweetest' of materials, that in excess becomes horrific.

Snowmobile (2000)

Her interest in light sensitivity is also in the forefront in a large suite of drawings titled Portal (2002). Pullen draws the viewer into a complex interplay between the object and its method of production. Long doodles on silver reflective paper, the seven round drawings appear on first glance and from a distance, as though they are manufactured through a technological process. Like a computer screensaver that utilizes a randomizing program, the drawings maintain a fluid, unrehearsed quality. On close inspection, however, it becomes clear the lines are hand drawn. Their dimensional and hypnotic qualities raise allusions with the works of artists such as Eva Hesse and Jackie Winsor, whose formalist sculptures often employed laborious wrappings and entanglements of objects. Hesse described her working method, for instance, as "making time" and "perceiving time" so that "form grows out of process." Portal achieves a similar effect. An immediate impression of drawings that seem quickly but complexly produced mutates under a closer and more considered view. 'Fast' skids to a slow crawl, and what was unfathomable becomes fantastically simple.

Reid Shier (2003) Contemporary Art Gallery, ISBN 0 920751881, Vancouver BC Canada

Silver is central to Lucy Pullen's exhibition "A Thousand Miles of Dust and Ashes." Compared to gold, silver is utilitarian and industrial. Aesthetically and economically, gold denoted ostentation and wealth, while silver is more modest and bourgeois. The melancholy and sublime cast to the exhibition's title seems at odds with the idiosyncratic quality of the works: a silver print of the artist in a reflective silver skirt (Flash, 1999), a rope sculpture covered in the same light-sensitive silver material from which the skirt was made (The Thing, 2003) and a series of double-line drawings on circular grounds of metallic paper (Portal, 2002).The title's commutations of ruination, even apocalypse, serve as a linguistic enticement into a closer investigation of possible meanings. Product and invention never seem to be the point. Discovery, arising from the process of creation and destruction, does. As in an alchemical experiment, the multiple qualities of silver, as metal/colour, run through all the works. In turn, the notion of alchemy leads to a sense of investigation into the nature of materials and to an encounter with a magical effect. An otherworldliness emanates from the silver print. Photographed with a flash, at night, Pullen's skirt becomes a void of glowing light,

an opening through which the viewer enters or is sucked in (like the door in Poltergeist or Malevich's Black Square on a White Ground).The snake-like sculpture, The Thing, is a meandering tangle of ropes that rise and fall in defiance of gravity, recalling mythic Laocoon being strangled by sea snakes, or, likewise, the viewer's gaze caught up in its sinuous, reflective mass. The silvery "snakeskin" covering the ropes is so much about artifice that one wonders about what lies beneath the skin, as if the ropes were the musculature of the sculpture. The cloth is hiding something, the way the wooden horse of Troy concealed a veritable war machine. While largely abstract, Pullen's work has a tendency toward figuration. Portal, the series of automatist double-line drawings, unconsciously takes on the form of plant life or breasts. A sense of exploring the fundamentals of time and space is also present. It is in instances of exposure time, capturing impressions of light onto film; the swallowing of a three dimensional body by a glowing void; the phenomenological aspect of The Thing and its dependence on a perambulation; the following of a single line through three-dimensional space with multiple positive/negative entrance points; the illusion of three dimensionality in drawn

contour lines on a two-dimensional surface.All of these basic elements reflect back on the mediums themselves: flatness, light, dimensionality and defiance of gravity. The spectre of modernism returns, or rather we are reminded that it never went away. Maybe it also evokes the idea of a return from the future, the idea that the future and past fold in upon themselves. If modernism is here, it is a ghost. Or a rhizome that buries itself under the ground. Or a geological vein.The associations of silver have something to do with the nature of history and memory after modernism. Pullen's work plays off how history is embedded in memory. In Walter Benjamin's words are consistent with "A Thousand Miles of Dust and Ashes": "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. "

Marina Roy, Canadian Art Magazine, Fall 2003