I grew up in Houston on a ditch-latticed, shoulderless road.  My friends and I used to pass infinite afternoons on the edge of the hazel ditch water, letting it cloud and settle around our feet.  Presently a swarm of tiny, transparent fish would nose up to the puckered skin of our toes.   First, we would see a watercolored wrinkling of water, then feel dozens of the soft, shrill nips.  It was hypnotizing, that underwater spray of fishlets, swirling and scrounging  on the melted calluses of our 8 year old feet.

     Nina Katchadourian's show is not about minnows or ditches,  but as you leave the building, having seen something so sheer that it's nearly not there. . .  suddenly it is -- nibbling and tugging at your attention with a persistence that greatly exceeds its physical mass.

     The work is in ArtPace's Hudson Room, a smallish gallery of three walls and an awkward hallway.   The first wall is devoted to Katchadourian's dealings with a garden spider in the forests of Finland.    The second hosts a collection of 'found poems' derived from fortuitously-stacked book titles (their charm--which we will not belabor here--a function of typeface and brevity).  The third wall supports a slideshow of yet more bibliophilia, behind which a thirty-minute audio loop of the 1969 lunar landing plays.  The fourth and last part of Katchadourian's suite is a totally darkened room, indeterminate in size, but full of sound.    By accident or by accidental design  the room is very easily overlooked, if not underheard.

             There.  Having discharged my duty--to alert you to the presence of the hidden room--I rock back on my critical heels and ask: how much is enough?  Just because the (looking) glass is half-empty doesn't mean that it is not full.
 
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     Long before the publication of Charlotte's Web, weaving had been romanced as a form of writing (is that a harp on Calliope's arm, or a loom?),  albeit of a literacy so elastic that it exceeds human attention (which, we have to admit, can be rather brittle on the best of days).     Every now and then someone --usually an artist-- will discover herself woven into this 'realworldweb.'   The next move is both liberating and perilous.  Liberating because of the sudden readability of a 'natural' system that had just a moment ago seemed noisy and opaque.    Perilous because adding to that script requires knowing how  to subtract (or to be more precise, evacuate) in the same instant; a parley at which humans are notoriously inept.    Typically,   Katchadourian at first did not show much aptitude for the equity of the realworldweb.  When she decided to 'repair' the spidery veils near her vacation cabin in Finland,  the artist began from the all-too-human surmise that indeed the webs were damaged.  This opinion was not shared by the resident arachnid, who quickly erased Katchadourian's 'gift.'    The exchange between the two weavers, prickly and suggestive, is given in a handful of documentary images.

     But look -- or better, listen-- around this exhibit.   At some point it dawned on Katchadourian that the realworldweb is not script so much as speech; not written, but spoken.   Book titles are the width of one breath,  ejecta which, in flawless synchrony, draw the next mouthful up to the eyes--while her slides clatter aptly  between the scratch and wheeze of  the Moonwalk Variations.   As Katchadourian's media  thins from sight and thickens to sound,  this small show  resolves on an abyssal note: you pass through the darkened room,  freed from the definity of image and are delivered, finally, to what the artist caught in the web of her hearing.   The gist of a rhetoric that moves when you do...  minnows,  morsels, glimpses, rhei.

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