PETER CAINE NEW WORKS
Peter Caine has already achieved quasi-cult status as the wicked Walt Disney. Through his perverse engineering, our heroes, villains and sacred cows mechanically come alive as Frankenstein robots, oozing pitch-dark schoolboy humor as they sing and dance their way into our hearts. The kids clamor at the door to get in, but clearly this is not suitable for family viewing.

In "New Works" at Jack the Pelican, his fifth New York solo exhibition, Peter Caine outdoes himself with multiple figure installations of dazzling ambition, the likes of which few amusement houses have ever seen. Lights, sounds, voices and sheer quirky madness combine with homespun animatronic bravado to create a spectacle of dark Baroque magnificence.

There is his life-size ship of fools near the gallery's entrance--Dorothy and the Tin Man crossing the Delaware with George Washington, Prince Whipple and a very talkative Barbara Bush, gushing over the prodigious member of the Marquis de Sade, literally a fountain of spewing jism. A critter greeting them on the marshy shore identifies himself as a beaver and he demands to be shaved.

Just beyond, a forest of eight- and nine-foot tall nyloned and Brancusi-esque Cabana Boys wriggle to a silent, funky beat. Some are striped like Pippy Long-stocking and one, the beast of the bunch, sprouts long cascades of synthetic hair. In their shadow is an angry God, handsomely feathered with the hackles of partridges and pheasants and swelling with bursts of light, as he pronounces his indignation.

Towards the rear of the main gallery is Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, pulling along a shuffling, homeless black Santa with his shopping cart of wonderland toys. They and friends are on their way to Rehab Island. Santa sings Christmas in a deep bass. Rudolph squeaks out an hilarious and irreverent six-minute testimonial.

With animatronic prowess, Caine transforms the back gallery into a gloriously beautiful undersea world, teeming with tropical fish. This coral reef is a nuclear dumping ground, littered with containers of radioactive waste from a nuclear submarine. A navy diver takes Geiger readings. He radios his commanding officer on the USS Sperry, a sub-tender out of Port Loma, California that floats in miniature on the surface above. As the channels get mixed with a civilian ordering takeout from Long John Silver's, an audio play ensues. The scene echoes an incident from Caine's own tour of duty on the ship, when he was routinely forced to participate in the dumping of nuclear waste.

Peter Caine is a self-taught artist, raised in Saint Louis. He began making collages while recovering from a crippling leg injury at the US Naval Hospital in Jacksonville Florida. His massive installation Overseer at PS 1's "Greater New York" was among the hits of the show. Reviews of his work have appeared in many publications, including Art News, The New York Times and Art Forum.