Diana Puntar

No Longer Empty in Chelsea Hotel

From sculptural works to modular installations, Puntar’s work examines the borders between natural and man-made frontiers. Her installation, Stick With Fire, is a meandering collection of various carved forms: fire, smoke and skeletal remains sit atop and around stone wall fragment tables littered with beer cans and other evidence. Sitting alongside are slightly perverse gnome-like sculptures insinuating strange garden ornamentation. These pieces are made in layers of plywood built incrementally like the rings of a tree. Various mirrored surfaces distort and produce the illusion of infinite spaces creating a hallucinogenic-landscape. In the dark, phosphorescent forms glow eerie sci-fi green light into the mirrored surfaces. Outer space and pre-history convene as a synthetic collected work of meteor-rock-tree-part detritus. Although the work envisions a post apocalyptic planet where environmental degradation and the marketplace have consumed all that is familiar, the final effect is far from pessimistic.