VISUALS

CORNELIA PARKER

Spider corpses and snake venom are among the sculptor Cornelia Parker's materials--guillotines and explosives are among her tools. These are the things that keep Parker up at night, "the things that make the hair on the back of my neck stand up," as she puts it.

Parker is already well-known in her native England: she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997 and had a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in 1998. But the exhibit now showing exclusively at the ICA is Parker's first stateside museum survey. It is a mesmerizing show, covering a decade of her magical and witty work.

Beholder beware: Parker is a sneaky sort of artist. While the explanatory placards that museum curators nail up beside the art are generally a waste of time, Parker packs conceptual punch right in the average aesthete's blind spot--when looking at her work, do stop and read the captions.

For instance, one of her pieces is a long piece of metal wire strung through the eye of a needle. The little placard says that the piece is called Three Fathoms in a Thimble and made out of a "silver thimble drawn into wire and threaded through a needle." Eloquent, elegant, it clicks.

Or take the Spider that Died in Mark Twain's House, sandwiched between two glass slides and projected on the wall. Although the piece itself is visually arresting, something--some poignancy, some aura--is added by the knowledge that it was in Twain's house that the spider died.

In another piece, Shared Fate, we see an array of objects--a pair of gloves, a deck of cards--sliced into by that most humane of execution devices, the guillotine. This wasn't just any big blade; it was, as the caption informs us, the one used to behead Marie Antoinette, now too rusty to slice bread.