The work that John Monti has shown over the last few years occupies a niche somewhere between Minimalist floor pieces, Earth works and landscape design.  He constructs large, low, undulant wooden frames and gives them a dark covering of cement, fiberglass or rubber.  He showed such work at the Sculpture Center and LedisFlam in 1993, and recently in an outdoor installation at MetroTech Center in Brooklyn and in a group show at Art in General.  His Elizabeth Harris show was significant for its introduction of small, colored wall sculptures, abstract and amusing, and for a huge installation piece, 26 feet in diameter, in the lineage of his earlier floor pieces but pushing to new extremes.

Every sculpture in this show (all date from 1997) occupied a particular place in the room.  Angle Bob (Rose) is like a barnacle or a scale insect that attached itself to the wall about 7 feet up.  Like all the wall sculptures, the form is made of pigmented rubber over fiverglass foam.  This one measures 20 by 10 by 7 inches and is close to oval in outline, hanging falt against the wall but rigin to an irregular soft ridge.  It's a cheerful, glossy candy red; a similar piece is slick yellow.  Corner Bob is a large white bulge that clings to a projecting corner in the L-shaped room, hanging like an enormous flabby bear belly with ripples and sags in its satiny white surface.  White Junior, again high on the wall, looks like a coated aspirin tablet while Rudy Gel Extra Large is the size and shape of a portable blackboard, but its redness and rounded edges recall a Coca-Cola sign.  Its semitransparent surface allows a view of dark lines - perhaps brushstrokes or maybe sanded striations.

One walks out of this exhibition, however, thinking of the strangeness of the big piece, Dressed Up (pigmented plastic over fiberglass foam over plywood), which surrounds a square pillar in the center of the gallery and makes that structural element appear to be there for its convenience.  The pillar and sculpture play at opposites: one is white, the other neutral gray; one is vertical, the other spreads horizontally; one is square in profile, the other spreads horizontally; one is square in profile, the other consists of curves; one is rigid, the other looks fluid.  In conjunction, they are a perfect yin/yang, male/female.  This piece can be walked on, which makes it kin to Carl Andre's metal floor tiles.  But Monti's sculpture comes with a contemporary, almost cartoonish sense of animation.  It looks soft (though it's not) and creepily alive, like The Blob.  Monti achieves a perfection of ambiguity in this work, and one can't say wheather the scupture flows from the pillar to take over the room, or sucks itself upward to engulf the pillar.
- Janet Koplos