Art in America
May, 1998
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Brian Sikes
Zolla Lieberman Gallery

Brian Sikes's gigantic works engross the viewer with familiar images made mysterious by dense and ambiguous accumulation. The images are laser‑ or inkjet‑printed in sections and then seamlessly transferred onto paper, canvas or the wall, interlayered with acrylic paint. Sikes's earlier works were massive graphite drawings of building materials and structural elements such as nuts and bolts or piers and buttresses, multiplied and arranged into architectonic fantasies; he now adds to his graphic repertory images extracted from children's decals and science workbooks. Many of the new pieces refer to the industrial progression from simple mechanics to today's complex technology.          

Redoubt is a large work that consists of cutout portions of digitally scanned graphics and photographs, transferred directly to the wall. The upper section is a clear, high‑contrast drawing of a worker cranking a winch to raise a water bucket from a well. The lower half is a scanned photograph of crystals that Sikes blurred, grayed and distorted on the computer; in the transfer process he overlaid it with acrylic paint so that it looks like piles of lumber from a wrecked building. The whole suggests technology's promising beginnings on shaky ground.

Other, more playful, works grew out of Sikes's experience as a new father observing his son's processes of discovery and learning. In these pieces, Sikes creates conceptual environments by combining pictures of real objects to serve imaginary purposes, much as children build towers with blocks or sand. In my favorite, Small Mysteries, Solid, circles connected by rods simultaneously suggest Tinkertoys and molecular structures -‑ both of which become something entirely different when the elements are rearranged. Small Mysteries, Gas depicts toy airplanes of World War 11 vintage buzzing around randomly in a field populated by circular shapes that suggest targets, radar screens, wheels and propellers.

Sikes has begun to use color in a few pieces. The tone of the works, however, remains as before: color operates more as value than as hue, and is also a means of distinguishing objects. Although he devotes himself to developing new ways to produce art works of great beauty, their smooth, cool and ultimately distancing surfaces discourage visceral responses. Their fascination lies in how the mix of images and materials produces meaning

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.