Faith any more

David Gyscek asks if there is anything left to believe in

by Leon Nigrosh

RHAPSODY OF A BURNT DANCER: PHOTOGRAPHS AND SCULPTURE BY DAVID M. GYSCEK At the Douglas Arts Common, 274 Main Street, Douglas, through September 26.

The photography and sculpture by David M. Gyscek currently at the Douglas Arts Common appear to present a tortured soul fighting to lose hidden Judeo-Christian demons. Representations of curled and twisted body parts, images of dying New Testament characters, and torsos pierced by steel shafts might initially create a sense of doom and despair.

But this is not the case. Gyscek is a clear-eyed, well-centered young man who has taken up both photography and sculpture as outlets for experimenting with light and shade, mass and void. He often combines natural occurrences with manufactured situations -- with a healthy respect for historical art forms thrown in for good measure. Any heavy psychological baggage attached to his work has been placed there primarily by observers.

In fact, Gyscek has ascribed quasi-religious connotations to only a single work, The Auto-Martyrdom of Sebastian, through which he expresses the opinion that there are no longer any causes important enough to martyr oneself. In this work, consisting of eight smaller photographs and two large ones placed sequentially, we see a near-naked man slowly succumbing to a fusillade of arrows until, in the last frame, he lies near death in an open field. One immediately noticeable oddity is that this Biblical scenario takes place in a modern-day plaza filled with automobiles and bicyclists.

A closer look reveals that each frame is a meticulous collage of elements; the "martyr" is the artist himself, and the ministering Irene appears twice in the same scene, working and watching. Gyscek wryly gives away some of his technical secrets (such as how he posed bristling with arrows) in a montage of 40 small photos and drawings on another gallery wall. Many of these items served as preliminary studies for other works in the show like The Death of St. Narcissus.

This 30x24-inch photograph is a heavily cut up and repasted image with skewed perspective and mismatched elements depicting a young man and his not so mirror image. Inspired by a T. S. Eliot poem (posted nearby), the work exudes a visual tension that is enlivened by the projection of the original negative over the entire surface. Here again, Gyscek's intentions are primarily within the realm of the nuts and bolts of art, but viewers eagerly ascribe other meanings and attributes.

Gyscek is equally at home with three-dimensional steel sculpture. His 1996 Improvisation in Steel is a dictionary of welding, cutting, bending, and bolting techniques that blends together to create a formal arch with a decidedly human scale and aspect. Where Are You Looking, Mr. More? is a rusted slab of bolted steel nearly seven feet tall with a terra cotta face peering through a square cut near the top. No matter where you stand in the room, this sculpture gives you the feeling that someone is watching you -- and taking notes.

Two works are titled Attraction/Repulsion, both are suspended from the ceiling and both represent their titles, but each in a different way. The earlier work, made in 1996, consists simply of a rusted steel sheet with a sword-like steel shaft thrust downward through it and into a human chest cast in concrete. Gyscek claims he was merely attempting a formal study with materials at hand, and that any gruesome implications were unintended.

To help bolster these remarks, he recently developed Attraction/ Repulsion II, using only two clean steel sheets and steel cable supports. This time, the work takes on the attributes promulgated as the essence of art by the early 20th-century Constructivists. They denied the use of solid volumes as expressions of space, and instead relied on planes and lines to shape space as volume.

Devoid of any metaphorical manifestations implied by the human and sword shapes in the earlier sculpture, this exercise begins to examine attraction and repulsion in the natural sense, as magnets attract and repel. The guy wires direct our attention to the space created by the dynamic tension that occurs between the gentle curves of the steel planes. Much like the early-'70s Minimalist works by Donald Judd, this sculpture has no story to tell except about itself. We can simply enjoy it for what we see.

As to where Gyscek will go from here, the short answer is New York and grad school. As far as his artistic future in photography and sculpture, wherever he ends up, this exhibition will always serve as his foundation. And it is a solid one.

The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Call 476-7082.