Fantastical, faraway lands

ARTWALK

In the lazily placid streets of New York's Chelsea district, you might as well allow yourself to be transported to another realm.

From the bustling surroundings, you walk into the heart of the arts as few other cities anywhere offer. It's a fantasy world as you walk around gallery after gallery endlessly. It's like the art version of that over-much dessert, "Death by Chocolate". But you don't die. You go on a high, loving the moment. The many moments.

This journey to 24th and 10th streets (and the vicinity) is one. There are others, such as those generated by Didier Massard and Dustin Yellin, in two separate exhibitions. Both create fantastical, faraway worlds without knowing them directly.

In a sense it is like the famous Russian Matrioshkas, the concentric, one in the other dolls. You walk into this unlikely world and then you walk into Massard or Yellin, showing respectively in the Julie Saul and the Robert Miller Gallery here.

Massard is the creator of clean, crisp, imaginary landscapes unleashed by a leap in both technology and powered by the overwhelming number of images in the contemporary world.

For almost a decade Massard, the commercial photographer, slunk away from his main work and created landscapes that existed in his mind. The results of this are spectacular. A giant, shadowy rhino trundling across the blue frame.

In another photograph, Massard creates a delicate seascape, white bottom sand nesting corals. This is exotica, somewhat. It would have bordered on a kind of Orientalism if we were not able to see the larger picture, his addressing the fascination with far flung locales, or even a parody of it.

If one genre of photographers return with "authentic" landscapes and portraits, Didier generates them right in his studio. When he does this, it is as a rejoinder to the fixed idea of the faraway.

Dustin Yellin, on the other hand, captures "specimens" as he mimics hunters and collectors. His painstaking drawings, layer upon layer of painted resin, appear to work like a modern day natural history museum where creatures are trapped in resin, preserved for everyone to marvel at.

The process of working dexterously and imaginatively, layer by layer, painting on each to build up volume, is akin to the natural process of creating the archaeological find, or creating a fossil. Look closer, and you'll wonder what exactly these objects are.

Most look like sea forms, delicate and wispy. You'll need a zoologist, or the artist, to confirm that these are only strands of Yellin's imagination.

By painting these incredibly life-like objects, Yellin is able to create another kind of mock-exotic right next to us.

In this way, he interrogates the idea of collecting and "bringing back" treasures, pushing us to wonder if any more collections of antiquities must be built up, and how?

His gossamer sculpture is anchored in these global times, rescinding the idea of such Marco Polo-esque voyages and the objects brought back. As a country that has been claiming back looted treasures from the British, Yellin's work offers Indians food for thought.

With such work these artists, unwittingly perhaps, juxtapose their art with immediate politics. Their home spun, local and paradoxical "other worlds" offer us "" their audiences "" the "other" of conquest, of invasion.

Instead of jewels, natural and otherwise, from faraway lands, they draw out experiences and recreate desirable objects in studios. The exotic of exotica loses its sheen.