Michael Ashkin: Bronwyn Keenan Gallery.

In a certain sense, the single most important thing informing Michael Ashkin's psycho-hobbyist dioramas is the fact that he grew up in New Jersey. He makes scale models of the parts of Jersey everyone likes to make fun of: the toxic industrial zones where nature has more or less packed it in and been replaced by decaying trucks and refineries, nasty smelling gasses and strange balls of flame. As for people, they come in machines, or not at all. The particular chunk of wasteland reproduced in #33, 1996, is a straight stretch of highway, bordered by a string of power lines, that runs through an oily lake. Everything here comes covered in the pellucid sheen and colors of chronic rot (Ashkin uses an appropriately poisonous substance called Envirotex to make his swamps); all the vegetation is patchy and exhausted, dying trees and grasses reproduced in the appropriate deathly colors. And in the middle, rolling down the thirteen-feet-to-one-inch scale highway, there's a solitary tanker truck (Ashkin uses the smallest-gauge models available) that, when you squat to view it head on, appears to be approaching.

There's a real cinematic quality to Ashkin's piece: it looks just like one of those mock-ups F/X guys make then blow to bits. Consequently, you halfway expect some Ray Harryhausen nasties to emerge from the murk, just as they did in all those nature-run-amok movies that were so popular during the '50s and '60s (Radioactive Twenty Foot Insects Destroy City!). At the same time, you're reminded of almost every road movie ever made, and their attendant themes of freedom or fear - or both, i.e. Thelma and Louise; The Wages of Fear; Kings of the Road; Paris, Texas. Ashkin, it seems, is mostly after the odd beauty and romanticism of such sites: he's attempting a scale model of a kind of postindustrial, late-capitalist sublime.

If German Romantics were forced to make do with awful places like mountain tops and cliffs overlooking the sea, or awful events like storms or sinking ships, their latter-day incarnations must contend with the man-made version (fearsome nature being in short supply nowadays), which, nonetheless, produces a similar effect on affect. Burning oil fields in Kuwait, miles and miles of toxic refinery zones in Jersey, clear-cut rain forests in Brazil: all these neosublime locales look pretty much the same, all are both large and frightening. Somehow though - maybe it's a question of scale - Ashkin's dioramas, unlike the actual places or the work of other like-minded artists (Chris Burden comes to mind), induce a feeling more like "hey, neat" than anything else. Which is fine, but rather limited.

- MVdW