Working in the tradition of the heroic narrative, Sherry Wong references allegorical stories to create autobiographical paintings in her first solo show. These works will occupy the front gallery, and the walls around the displayed sculpture by Kristian Burford.

Sherry Wong's series incorporates the iconography of Dante's inferno with images from fairytales, myths such as Psyche and Cupid, and children's stories from different cultures, including Little Red Riding Hood, Alice in Wonderland, Baba Yaga, and Vasalisa the Brave.

The artist assumes the role of the hero in this fictional recreation of identity, sublimating the occurrences of her life to construct her own fledgling epic story of love, lust, betrayal, religion and suffering. We find her hero lost in the wood like Dante's pilgrim, but instead of entering hell to escape from the three beasts that frighten the pilgrim, she has cut their heads off with a birch tree staff. In the forest, she confronts Baba Yaga's hut guarding the fountain of life and death. Within hell in another painting, we see the hero clutched by a man who has been turned into a tree. We are in the forest of suicides: where those who killed themselves are punished by not having bodies in the afterworld. These narratives are steeped in melodrama and self-mimicry, but they retain a sense of naïveté.

The flattened imagery of the birch panels is evocative of traditional Russian lacquer boxes, Islamic book illustrations and Chinese miniatures. The main figures, and especially the hero figure, are drawn with strong black outlines. Every figure documents her various personas; and so from painting to painting, the audience encounters a myriad of costumes and hair changes set in the context of theatrical gestures and captured moments of fantasy.

This series of works presents confessional art through a visor of role-playing. In a culture obsessed with the self but steeped in social constructs, it is commonplace to think of an authentic persona as a deception since so much is defined by context. By changing the context of her own story into that of an epic, Wong invites the audience to find symbols that they can relate to their own lives and regain control over their own sincerity.

Sherry Wong was born in 1978 in Virginia. She received a BA in Studio Arts at Smith College, and lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work was recently included in OnLine at Feigen Contemporary, curated by Charlie Finch, George Negroponte and Robert Storr; and is currently being shown in Beauty, curated by Mark Wehby, at Kravets-Wehby Gallery.

The title of Kristian Burford's sculpture is: During the later period of Christopher’s residence at boarding school, he learnt that if the hand of a sleeping boy were to be submerged in tepid water, the boy would be made to wet his bed. After the passing of a considerable number of years, this knowledge has provided him with a subject for a short video. He is producing the video alone, on this Sunday evening, in a chamber that once served as his mother’s sewing room. In the years between her death and Christopher’s present production, it has contained only a small number of disused items that have failed to find a home elsewhere in the apartment.

“Isolated in the sewing room of the apartment that he inherited from his parents, Christopher makes a video in a desperate effort to imagine a state that exceeds the banality of the world beyond his room. The room is heavy with a sweet musty atmosphere produced by years of disuse. Christopher is encouraged in his experiment by the decadence of expired purpose that he observes in the objects that surround him.

The image on the television exists in a still deeper isolation than the room. By taking up the point of view of the being that submerges three fingers of Christopher's right hand in tepid water, a view provided by the television, and executing his imagined subconscious response, by urinating on his bedding, he accomplishes a loss of control to himself.

In the play of this isolated reaction Christopher perfects his narcissism.” (Burford)

This sculpture was recently shown at the Happy Lion Gallery in Los Angeles. In spring 2004 it will be included in The Uncanny, a group exhibition curated by Mike Kelly and Christoph Grunenberg, at the Tate Liverpool. This is the fifth of Kristian Burford's houses. The previous work, Katherine..., was shown in 2002 at I-20 in Jan Tumlir's Morbid Curiosity (with Tom Allen, Julian Hoeber and J.P. Munro). Burford was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1974. He was educated at the University of South Australia, and received his MFA at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He lives and works in Los Angeles.