January 07, 1999 — February 08, 1999 76 Grand Street, New York Tom Shannon’s installation, Serene in Suspense, was a life-size sculpture of a female figure floating on her back in a condition suggesting weightlessness. Her body was portrayed in a relaxed posture, legs slightly parted, fingers laced behind her head, eyes looking both outward and inward. While her proportions and features are a hybrid of stylizations from various times and cultures, her body was rendered to appear undeformed by gravity, a possibility available only in our time. A pole counterbalancing the figure’s weight, allowing it to move vertically, also supported the figure, balanced and suspended by a fine line from her navel. A strong magnet in her head aligned with Earth’s magnetic field caused the figure’s sex to face south, where the Sun is, in the manner of a compass. Shannon’s subject attempts to proportionally locate the human in the vast scales above and below us.