Robin Levy shows us an image of a long horizontal white & red banded strand: LIFELINE #3 (umbilical cord), which is a C print edition (1 of 3). Almost completely abstract at first glance, two thick red bands are stretched over a strand, winding around it like stripes on a candy cane, disappearing left and right. The strand between these bands is very light pink, so faint that it is difficult to differentiate from the white ground engulfing it, fully revealed only by imagination conspiring with the absence implied by the two red bands. The flatness of the image and the texture of the red where present makes this similar to a microscope slide at first undetermined but very beautiful. The half inch thick piece of glass laid over the image seems to preserve it in an attempt to make it more observable. A precious thing, to be revered, elegant in its simple seeming complexity. Powerful in its purpose. Levy’s treatment of composition and the fomal qualities of the almost abstracted image unfolds a mystery, the umbilical cord which lends its purpose to the work in its title: LIFELINE.
Levy succeeds in dedicating the same purposeful simplicity in this photograph that she has brought to all her recent work. Although the sculptor’s concern with the object and its fabrication are less pronounced here than in her more conventionally three dimensional practice, her restraint here is no less carefully considered, her deployment of materials retaining their purposefulness in the displaying of this astonishing photograph.
Matthew Baughman