Accompanied by my friend Steve, I followed the gallery director and curator Rebecca Miller down a long thin hallway and winding stair into a small backyard garden leading to the gallery. As it shows on the website, the Blackbird gallery is a basement level apartment turned exhibition space. The gallery is physically unusual with cinder block walls and long white drapery covering most of the back. It's something like a reprieve from the more typical white-wash, but the grid of windows at the entrance and the high ceiling just barely save the gallery from the melancholy architecture of a suburban basement.

After a walk through the show I asked Miller about the exhibition's title and she pointed me to a three-ring binder. After scanning the press release, I asked again about the Past Lives and Personal Excorcisms. In response she encouraged me to free associate, which was actually included in the press release, "The work in this show humorously reveals free associations in conjunction to the theme..." The murky logic of humorously revealing free associations seemed impossible and left me confused.

After a couple minutes of meandering conversation, Miller launched into a widly tangential narrative about each work in the show, and I can't avoid saying, it was kind of humorous. It seems the only coherent thread running through the work in Past Lives... is Miller's sincere respect for the artists. Ultimately the personal sentiments of the artists that serve as rationale for the exhibition remained opaque. While there are some defiantly interesting works by artists Bob Linder, Stephanie Syjuco and Xylor Jane, talking about them in this context is, for this reviewer, frustrating and problematic.

It seems much of the artwork exhibited at Blackbird, or at least the work in this exhibition, might fall under the umbrella of "psychological abstraction." While some of the works suggest a moodiness or dark pathos, ultimately we're left with something similar to a rorschach test. Like staring at rorschach cards, you're supposed to tell us what you see in the amorphous shapes. This kind of projection of personal fears and desires onto the world of objects is key to establishing or maintaining a commodity fetish, something not missed by commercial galleries, but somewhat surprising from an artist run outfit like BlackBird. If a free-form guessing game sounds like fun then head down to blackbird, of course you can just as easily free-associate with any random object in the comfort of your own home.

Untitled, Cliff Hengst

More images at: http://www.blackbirdspace.com/past.html