Two separate things occured while I was working on the review of Katina Huston's recent exhibition 'Field of Vision'. First I visited an artist who was working on a new series that used photographs of the backs of well known paintings to create new artworks. Jean Baudrillard's theory of simulacrum, the re-creation of an object based not on the original but of an image of the original should be kept in mind when considering Huston's ink on Mylar drawings.

Although she is creating a drawings as opposed to an actual object, the fact that Huston has removed the subject directly from her imagery by capturing its shadow, is intriguing. Huston projects an artificial light onto the subject which casts a shadow onto the canvas. She then pours a variety of ink onto the Mylar paper, and waits for the layer to dry before continuing on. By relying on the shadow to recreate the objects form, in the case of 'Shadow Pair', a chair, Huston gifts the object a new life. She goes beyond simple depiction of the chair, to the more interesting tension between presence and absence, and a completely new perspective on the object.

Huston has previously worked with the imagery of bicycle rims and it is with this object matter that she is able to add another layer of dimensionality. In works such as 'Tsunami' and 'Dynamo', Huston seems to have constantly repositioned the light on the rim while simultaneously rotating the Mylar canvas, which results in a kinetic feeling, and adds a sense of motion to what could have easily stopped with static composition.

Huston also incorporates chandeliers into her drawings which brings me to the second occurence that caused me to re-think Huston's work. I am not sure if it is because of her handling of the chandelier, but ever since I saw Huston's drawings, every where I turn it seems that more and more artists are using chandeliers, and if so, her take on why it was becoming increasingly popular. Her response was "Chandeliers are the new skulls." This may be, but Huston's handling of the chandelier goes beyond any others I have seen. She brings another dimension to depictions like 'Light and Crystal'. The angle of this drawing draws the viewer close and once there, reveals her depth of technique. To render such detail by pouring ink onto a non-absorbent surface demonstrates not only skill and defininte knowledge of the ojbect, but an infinite amount of patience as well.

What was most surprising about Huston's show at Dolby Chadwick was her completely different body of work in a smaller adjacent gallery. Exhibited for the first time in San Francisco, this group used enamel and discarded human hair obtained from a friend who works in a hair salon. The results, as seen in 'Tropical Interior' are seductive patterns not unlike Victorian wallpaper. Beautiful to look at, I found myself struggling to calm the quiet nagging of repulsion that arose from its hair-ness. But this may in fact be what Huston wants to evoke. Simultaneously seductive and repellent. Huston successfully creates a subtly tactile feeling that lingers with the viewer long after they have left the gallery sapce.

Any exhibition that features work by notable Bay Area artists Hung Liu, Carlos Villa and Gail Wight probably warrants a visit. But the drawings of the little-celebrated Katina Huston upstage everything else in "Visual Alchemy Phase 2" at the Oakland Art Gallery.

In black coffin-like constructions fitted with small brass plates, Villa offers not very effective figures for interior life, personal memory and ancestry.

Liu shows characteristically vivid paintings and graphic works that translate antique photographs of people in China into a modernist aesthetic idiom.

Gail Wight offers a series of works that probe for links between the assumptions of science and those of visual display. Her inkjet prints of dissected mechanical toys make light of the scientific axiom that taking something apart is the best way to understand it.

But Huston's drawings outrun everything else here in visual impact and intelligence.

Huston draws in inks on Mylar, an impermeable material that causes liquid media applied to it to pool and settle out as they dry.

In the three pieces on view, she has piled up shadows cast by bicycles to create pictorial structures that wink with the recognizable details but finally force the eye to surrender to their sheer graphic brilliance.

Any bicycle part that appears in contemporary art will call to mind Marcel Duchamp's iconic "ready-made" of bicycle wheel pointlessly fastened atop a four-legged stool. Viewers who know Jasper Johns' ink on mylar drawings of Duchamp paintings will think of them also.

But Huston moves in just the opposite direction from Duchamp's drive away from "the retinal" in art and toward an exhilaration we might associate more with Futurism's delight in machinery and speed, had not so many Futurists also gloried in the civilazational crack-up of World War I.

Huston's work glories in the pleasures of seeing and the eye's transits as a possible brake on the waywardness of the mind.

Bay Area Artist Katina Huston has gotten a lot of artistic mileage out of drawings based on shadows cast by bicycle wheels, an image with surprisingly rich associations.

In her recent work at Dolby Chadwick, in an exhibition that ends today, shows her at the end of that road, beginning to turn in a new direction.

It takes a moment to recognize the indexical subject of "Light and Crystal" (2008) as a chandelier. The streetward orientation of Huston's earlier peices encourages us to see the image at first as a rubbing of a passage in the pavement, maybe a mahole cover. As in earlier work, her technique of flooding mylar with ink yields imagery that looks richly abstract inch by inch.

Another body of new work, involving a kind of flocking does not convince me yet, but it already stirs curiousity about her next show.

Visitors who know the lore of Marcel Duchamp's "readymades" will think of it the moment they encounter Katina Huston's pleasing show of drawings at Dolby Chadwick.

Huston generates forms by tracing and inking shadows cast by bicycle parts on Mylar sheets. Huston apparantly invokes Duchamp as a foil for the visual richness of her work.

The most famous bicycle wheel shadow in the history of art falls into Duchamp's 1918 painting "Tu'm'". The picture happens to be hanging in Los Angeles in the UCLA Hammer Museum's involving summer show "The Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America" (through August 20). The L.A. exhibition surveys the legendary collection that painter and patron Katherine Dreier assembled with Duchamp's help and eventually left to Yale University.

Duchamp's painted shadow evokes the notorious first 'readymade," a bicycle's front fork and wheel fastened upright to the seat of a kitchen stool. the 'original' disappeared in the flotsam of Duchamp's life, so he later authorized a small edition of replicas. The shadow in "Tu'um'" helped keep the quizzical object's memory alive, though the mere rumor of its making might have done as much.

Duchamp set himself against what he called the "retinal" emphasis of early 20th Century art. Picasso and Braque then had only recently shuffled the deck of pictorial space with Cubism. Monet, Renoir, and Degas were still at work in France, though all in failing health. Meanwhile, Matisse in midcareer struggled to give substance to "decoration."

The eye ruled and with the "readymades," Duchamp took a poke at it on behalf of ironic intellect and the then still unmapped context that modern art requires to shore up its meaning.

In "Mechanical Repeat I" Huston has nearly buried her allusion to Duchamp under half-legible, dissonant information. She has done it by overlapping shadows cast from several angles and by using ink on an impermeable surface. The ink puddles and runs, blurs contours and probably gets blotted up here and there. A riot of shattered description results, so involving to the eye that the mind willingly lets go of the handlebars.

In the 1980's Jasper John's based a series of ink-on -Mylar drawings on early paintings by Duchamp . Huston may actually have found permisson in John's example to dive back into aesthetic detail despite the momentum and prestige that now belongs to conceptual art.

The title of Huston's show, "Cyclone" refers to several pieces in which blotchy bike wheel shadows stack up into cyclone spirals. But I prefer the more congested, seemingly more disordered images. They put her process and its aesthetic payoff first.

It's not often that art succeeds in combining the monumental and the ephemeral, but Katina Huston's large scale images of bicycles managed to be both ghostly and remarkably solid. To say that Huston merely paints bicycles is a bit like saying Susan Rothenberg is just a horse painter. For years the Bay Area artist and philosophy instructor has used the bicycle as her personal talisman, depicting it repeatedly in oversize monochrome compositions in ink on Mylar. Among the works in this show, some captured a single bike emerging froma white background like the Shroud of Turin, a faint holy relic. Others offered a complex tangle of tires, gears, spokes and derailleurs-a web of metal transformed into a dance of light and dark.

Through trial and error, Huston has developed a painstaking technique. Using some 20 different inks, she must pour each layer and then allow it to dry before starting another because Mylar is a non-absorbent surface. As a result, the compositions rely to some degree on chance, on the physical process of pooling and evaporation. But the pieces are also tightly composed, and the totemic bikes emerge as if conjured from their constituent puddles and greaselike stains.

This exhibition offered several other variations on the bicycle motif, but none compared with the transparent washes on Mylar. In these works, the bicycle-a simple machine that becomes an extension of the human body- is subjected to an X-ray, transformed and made insubstantial. But the original, the soul of the machine is still there, a picture of the fleeting glance of a shadow.

Katina Huston's ink-on-Mylar drawings of bicycles - only bicycles- look startlingly like birch forests in winter. Such woods may be unfamiliar to Bay Areans used to wooly redwoods and chaparral, but back East, each individual tree stands calm and prim separated from its neighbors by plenty of space and light, reinforcing the precise specific shape of the next one. Alone a birch might appear unremarkable, but the repetition of angles has an odd magnifying effect, and that goes for Huston's somberly patient two-wheelers as well. Of course, trees are not circular, nor do they hang or have pedals to render as if they were bones in an X-ray. The water color quality of Huston's brownish-black ink makes color irrelevant: Everything takes a back seat to arches, tilts and a constant glowing white background.

Huston's untitled exhibition continues through July 1 at Dolby Chadwick Gallery , 210 Post (at Grant), SF. www.dolbychadwickgallery.com

-Hiya Swanhuyser.

Bicycles can set you free. Propelled by wheels, pedals and a pumping heart, you fly, float and soar.

Articulating that transcendent moment has challenged artists since medieval times. Many answer in mythological or religious renderings. Abstractionist Mark Rothko chose hovering hues.

Then, here's San Franciscan Katina Huston going for it with a bicycle. And she succeeds brilliantly by capturing an elusive target: the shadow as proof of experience. Shadows hold the future and the past but, as Thoreau postulated in "Walking," it's living in the present that permits spiritual migration, Huston's motif.

Huston makes the bicycle our metaphoric transport; its shadows our ephemeral moments. Like accumulative artist Deborah Oropallo, she foregoes irony, cultural references and narrative. Gingerl , she seeks individual survival and freedom through purity, silence and peace.

Expressing such non-tactile concepts requires skilled subtlety and chance. Pouring and painting black and brown ink on frosted non-porous Mylar, Huston accedes to instinct, trusting her artistic past. Shape-shifting with amoebic autonomy, the inks pool and seep between delicate calligraphic lines. Drying into patterns, they reiterate geologic tributaries and parched earth.

Within these translucent forms, a host of shadows shape the "Accumulation Series." Layers in "Bounce" mark time's passage as succinctly as diary pages. In "Tracings" Intertwining lines mimic the repetitive fleeting contact a wheel makes with earth. The "Shadow Series" includes small out of focus bicycle fragments and grand mystical impressions of a single bike. Their power feels cumulative, like the wisdom of age. In "Bicycle-Solo" handlebars morph into wings, beckoning us to break free.

Huston guides with elegant precision. Grasping the elusive seconds between reality and nirvana, she witnesses the invisible , mapping a path to revelation.