I looked at this show on the Petzel website and thought ho hum, not mad about it but at least Dana hasn't resorted to some safe formula, at least she's trying things. I wouldn't have bothered writing anything except I happened to watch James Kalm's You Tube of the opening and even with James' rough and ready camerawork you could get a pretty good idea of the surfaces and scale and errr... it was not pretty.
My fear used to be that Dana would sort of burn out and just resort to cute, Muppets/Sesame Street-like figures in amusing situations. There is that side to her. I think that's the side that appealed to Saatchi. That was about 8 years ago. To her credit she has avoided that. Her style has broadened from Muppet Expressionisti to nudge Picasso, Matisse and all stops to Joan Brown and Judith Linares. And yet she's not Californian. If anything she now seems to be over-reaching. The large scale things in particular just seem clunky, when once they had a sort of comic bravado. I think she's just trying to be too clever. The smaller things in the back room work much better. They show she's still got it. But now I wonder how much longer anyone's going to want it? All that scattered glee feels like it has a short shelf life.