By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: June 22, 2007

DAVID LAMELAS
Maccarone
630 Greenwich Street, at Morton Street, West Village
Through July 28

David Lamelas is best known in this country for his 1970s photographs of himself posing as a rock star. They read easily as proto-Cindy Shermans dealing with celebrity culture, something most Americans know plenty about.

Interesting, then, that his first show in New York in nearly 20 years focuses on an entirely different aspect of his oeuvre, about half of it from the 1960s, and the "Rock Star" photographs aren't even mentioned in the lengthy gallery news release.

The release instead includes an epigram by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, which starts: "Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river."

It is an apt departure point for Mr. Lamelas's "Time as Activity," a Conceptual project made up of 16-millimeter films and C-print film stills that explores notions of time, space and nomadic movement. (Mr. Lamelas left his native Buenos Aires in 1968 and currently lives and works "between," as the gallery puts it, Europe, Los Angeles and Buenos Aires.)

The best room in the show includes four silent films, each shot with a fixed camera in various locations, at various intervals, within one city: Düsseldorf (1969), Warsaw (2003), Los Angeles (2006) and New York (2007). Because the films are projected on four adjacent walls, you can turn in different directions and be - cinematically, if not literally - in different places and different moments simultaneously.

In the front gallery are three sculptures originally created in 1965, which Mr. Lamelas then destroyed and rebuilt in an attempt to merge painting, sculpture and architecture. Flat pieces of plywood (and in one case, Formica) are cut into curvy or angular shapes - one refers to the top of the Empire State Building - and arranged like building cards.

But the films and, to a lesser extent, the stills, are what is important here. Mr. Lamelas made a credible rock star, but "Time as Activity" is probably the work for which he would like to be remembered. MARTHA SCHWENDENER