Stephen Hendee's latest site-specific installation.

Stephen Hendee's latest site-specific installation, titled Iron Skies, was another of his walk-in environments that straddle the worlds of art and technology. The installation consisted of sum of two units adjacent cavernlike corridors constructed with black electrical tape, white corrugated plastic, colored lights and heated glue, which gave it a decidedly low-tech esthetic.

Hendee's mode of building was not exactly claustrophobic, nevertheless its low ceilings and undulating walls certainly encroached forward the viewer's space. At united point the ceiling became in the way that low that it was necessary to stoop low in order to pass to the nearest section. With its crystal-like, faceted construction, the space was at one time architectural and organic, fusing advanced design technologies with free-form creative spontaneity. The linear configurations formed at the tape that held together proper states of the work's rough-hewn interior evok a techno-future--a computer-model digital space, filled again with repetitive geometric forms and vector graphics. The dull-hearted white, slightly opaque walls were backlit with livid pink and orange lights, giving the piece a luminous brains of mystery. A soundtrack of distorted modem tones, compos by way of Hendee, recalled synthesized howling wind.

Interestingly, Hendee chose not to conceal the exterior of the installation. From the floor above, viewers could direct the eye down on the work in the museum's atrium and diocese its exoskeleton of makeshift aluminum supports, corrugated plastic and strips of colored scaly buds While the futuristic implications of the piece were undeniable, the work's lack of material slickness was equally striking. Iron Skies was lucky in its fantastical rendering of an imaginative protolithic time to come even as the mechanics of its illusion were publicly revealed.

--Derek Conrad Murray

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