E. V. Day 
HENRY URBACH ARCHITECTURE

E. V. Day recently hit the jackpot with installations on view simultaneously in the Whitney Biennial, in P.S. l's "Greater New York" gathering, and at Henry Urbach Architecture. The sudden popularity of this 33-year-old artist is likely due, in part, to her work's Pop-art appeal and humor. At the Whitney, she took a white halter-top dress (think Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch),- ripped it to shreds, and suspended the fabric in the air via hooks and wires. Hollywood's Bombshell was held spectacularly in midexplosion. At P.S. 1, Day engineered a similar apparatus, this time tearing apart plastic blow-up dolls to suggest, perhaps, a more orgasmic eruption in Flesh for Fantasy. Sex, glamour, violence—it's more Warhol than witty, feminist critique. At Henry Urbach Architecture, Day pursued a slightly different strategy. Celestial Pelvises hung overhead in the corners of the darkened gallery, a constellation of surgical-steel wire that was covered with droplets of resin and looped into shapes suggesting pelvic bones and female genitalia. Spotlit in the center of the gallery was a long, slinky, silver-sequined dress (given to Day by designer Stephen Sprouse) that was partially shredded, though the tangle of wires and hooks kept its shape mostly intact. In this piece, titled Transporter, the shimmering dress (a stand-in for the body) disintegrates rather than detonates, as if dissolving into the atmosphere. It has a majestic quality, an airborne Nike of Samothrace as diva in a low-cut dress. -But, at the same time, it disturbs; it's an eerie apparition of the female body brutally savaged. The message is muddled. Although the engineering is impressive and the theatrics effective, one doesn't know whether to marvel or wince at the spectacle. —Katie Clifford