BERLIN, GERMANY.- Deschler Galerie presents Tony Conway – Transit, on view through 30 July, 2005. The New York artist Tony Conway was born in New Hampshire in 1951 and educated, among other places, at MIT in Cambridge, MA. Starting point of his three-dimensional works are photographic snapshots of people that are then digitally manipulated and printed on transparent polyester. Combined with graphite drawings and acrylic colors on semitransparent sheets of plexiglas, the various layers are held together by stainless steel frames. The result is subtly hued, silkily blurry images with a fascinating spatial effect. Though each of the various layers carries its own pictorial information, they do not completely merge, but retain their independence in mutual interplay. Only the unobtrusive frame of stainless steel ensures that their fragile unity is not dispersed. It bestows a necessary stability on their subtle interactions and is therefore not just a practical necessity, but also has an important mental and pictorial effect.

The most immediately noticeable quality of the images is their multi-layered structure, both as material objects and as pictures, resulting from their combination of photography, painting, and sculpture. The snapshot that provides the basis of each picture isolates a single moment. However, the peculiar three-dimensional structure of the images reveals itself ultimately as a temporal process onto itself in which layers are successively laid on top of each other.

The resulting abstractions are neither rigidly systematic nor entirely arbitrary. Just like remembered images, where a non-dogmatic universality is achieved through a slow process of settling, certain details are retained in Conway’s images while others completely disappear. The moment appears less frozen than slowed down, while at the same time the figures are condensed into archetypal forms. Even the subtle hues of the images recall the subjective coloring of images in memory.

Both the ethereal effect of the images and their condensation of archetypal memory images appear intensified in Conways new series of works, in which the artist approaches the ephemeral in-between state of transit. Conway focuses on the very specific fluidly moving relationship of time and space in that strangely disorienting condition of no-longer and not-yet, or neither-nor. It is a state that is neither comfortably familiar nor exotically foreign to us, but that is at the same time both all to familiar and yet still perpetually foreign. Even though the state of transit is taking up an ever increasing amount of our time, it is a time that seems to us somehow unsubstantial, a time of waiting, a gap in our lives filled to the brim with activities. The locations that we associate with these times are similarly marked by their facelessness and anonymity. These are locations that are frequently purely functional and as such not site-specific, locations that could really be anywhere. The displacement inherent in this facelessness gives rise to a certain feeling of disquiet, while its efficient familiarity at the same time also reassures us. The state of transit is characterized by its sense of emotional, spatial, and temporal abeyance. Conway’s images, which despite their massive materiality manage to appear fragile and light, and which for all their weight seem to float on the walls, perfectly translate this experience into pictorial terms. (Text: Martin Oskar Kramer).