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As soon as photography was invented, people compared it to painting. Thus began a century-spanning dialogue that continues today with the cross-pollination between the two media producing all sorts of hybrids.
And now that film-based photography is being displaced by digital imagery, the discussion has expanded to include sculpture. At ACME, Katie Grinnan's new works play the virtual space of computers against the solidity of 3-D objects. Her wild hybrids are heady, head-spinning collisions between pictures and things that set the mind and pulse racing.
The biggest, nuttiest one transforms a corner of the gallery into a sideshow-style extravaganza that is part house of mirrors, high school basketball intermission and whirling dervish. A Pandora's box of high and low sources, it recalls the headless horseman from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Dr. Frankenstein's work as a cut-and- paste collage artist and Bruce Nauman's sculptures cast from the dismembered and reconfigured dummies taxidermists use to build lifelike trophies.
On one wall hangs a nearly life-size color photograph of four life-size figurative sculptures Grinnan made from molded plastic. Each is a headless cheerleader. They stand in front of a bright orange backdrop, linking limbs to form an acrobatic, gravity- defying tower of team spirit.
On the adjoining wall Grinnan has painted a bright orange rectangle. On the floor she has laid a similarly sized and tinted rectangle of linoleum. Atop it stand the four sculptures from the photograph.
Each homemade mannequin has been dissected and reassembled so that the foursome appears to be spinning, like a mutant maypole or a feverish vision of a Walpurgis Night dance. So dramatic is the effect that it seems as if there are more than four bodies in "Cheerleaders." To glance back and forth between the photograph of the figures and their 3-D version is to feel as if the genie has escaped from the bottle and there's no putting her back.
The other sculptures also pit two dimensions against three, suggesting that the world we live in is a lot less stable than it seems.
From one side, "Rubble Division" appears to be a devilishly clever photograph of doors and windows in which one-point perspective is folded, like industrial-strength origami, into an abstract pattern.
The other side includes twisted...