Gelah Penn’s “Reckless Moment,” detail, 2008.

Benjamin Genocchio in the NYTimes asks,

Is it possible to make a drawing without using a pen, pencil or paper? Why not — these days artists make art from anything at all, then call it what they like. Two who are experimenting with the formal properties of drawing are Serena Bocchino and Gelah Penn, the artists in “The Notion of Line,” a show at the Alpan Gallery in Huntington.

Ms. Penn makes the bigger conceptual leap, presenting a dazzling site-specific installation made of neon-colored fishing line, rubber tubing, weblike mesh, Styrofoam and plastic balls. Titled “The Reckless Moment” (2008), it cuts a wide swath across the gallery walls, messy and oddly alive like some bacterial colony.

By knotting, twisting and looping together her tendril-like materials, which are bunched in places in a dense thicket, Ms. Penn constructs a drawing in three dimensions. At the same time there is an ethereal feeling, conjuring associations with dust storms, weather systems or, on the microscopic level, the arterial network of the human body. [Read More…]