Silver is central to Lucy Pullen's exhibition "A Thousand Miles of Dust and Ashes." Com­pared to gold, silver is utilitarian and industrial. Aesthetically and economically, gold denotes ostentation and wealth, while silver is more modest and bourgeois. The melancholy and sublime cast to the exhibition's title seems at odds with the idiosyncratic quality of the works: a silver print of the artist in a reflective silver skirt (Flash, 1999), a rope sculpture covered in the same light-sensitive silver material from which the skirt was made ( The Thing) and a series of double line drawings on circular grounds of metallic paper (Portal, 2002). The title's connotation of ruination, even apocalypse, serve as a linguistic enticement into a closer investigation of possible meanings.

Product and invention never seem to be the point. Discovery, arising from the proce of creation and destruction, does. As in an alchemical experiment, the multiple qualities of sil­ver, as metal/colour, run through all the works. In turn, the notion of alchemy leads to a sense of investigation into the nature of materials and to an encounter with a magical effect. An otherworldliness emanates from the silver print. Photographed with a flash, at night, Pullen's skirt become a void of glowing light, an opening through which the viewer enter or is sucked in (like the door in Poltergeist tor Malevich's Black square on a White Ground). The snake-like sculpture, The Thing, is a meandering tangle of rope that rise and fall in defiance of gravity, recalling mythic Laocoon being strangled by sea snakes, or, likewise, the viewer's gaze caught up in it sinuous, reflective mass. The silvery" snakeskins" covering the ropes is so much about artifice that one wonder about what lies beneath the skin, a if the ropes were the musculature of the sculpture. The cloth is hiding something, the way the wooden horse of Troy concealed a veritable war-machine.

While largely abstract, Pullen's work has a tendency toward figuration. Portal, the series of automatists double-line drawing, unconsciously takes on the form of plant life or breasts. A sense of exploring the fundamental of time and space is also present. It is.

Marina Roy