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"Born in 1943, Elaine Reichek&amp;nbsp;studied under Modernist icon Ad Reinhardt at Brooklyn College as an undergraduate. She isn\u2019t exactly the kind of artist that comes immediately to mind for inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, a survey of the new and now. But her enigmatic works presented in the 2012 exhibition \u2014 embroidered panels reminiscent of sewing samplers that rework imagery from the Western canon, adding quotes from literature and philosophy as captions \u2014 form one of the otherwise-dull show's marquee moments.Viewers have another chance to see Reichek\u2019s work in a solo exhibition called \u201CAriadne\u2019s Thread\u201D currently at Nicole Klagsbrun gallery in Chelsea, where an unassuming display of a dozen works spaced widely around the walls is on view. The pieces are on a grander scale than those at the Whitney, though their deadpan delivery (an effect of the inarticulate, unsubtle colors of the thread and abundance of white space) undermines their own monumentality, much as Reichek undercuts the iconic nature of the myths she appropriates in &amp;nbsp;works.In the eponymous myth, Ariadne saves Theseus, the founder-king of Athens, from the entrapment of the Cretian Minotaur and his Labyrinth by giving him a length of string. After fleeing Crete with the hero, she is later abandoned by Theseus and becomes the wife of Dionysus, the god of wine. The Ariadne myth has been read as portraying woman as victim, which is no doubt a part of why Reichek has chosen it as fodder. The artist participated in the feminist collective art gallery A.I.R. alongside Nancy Spero and others, and had earlier attended Yale (before the school was officially co-ed) with the likes of \u201Cbig,\u201D rambunctious artists like Chuck Close and Richard Serra who,&amp;nbsp;she&amp;nbsp;recalled in a Smithsonian oral history, were uncomfortable with the presence of a woman in the studio.&amp;nbsp;Though there\u2019s a connection between Ariadne\u2019s mythical thread and Reichek\u2019s chosen medium of embroidery, the effect of incorporating the craft isn\u2019t about \u201Cbeing a woman artist,\u201D as she explained in a New Yorker profile. Rather, it\u2019s about something more subtle, an investigation of the very contemporary phenomena of pixelization and translation, the ability of the digital image to be replicated endlessly into vacuity. Reichek's process of appropriation drains the stories of Ariadne and Theseus and the Minotaur of all their vitality and stature, leaving only the skeleton narrative suggestions for us to wander.In \u201CWould You Believe It, Ariadne\u201D (2009) at Klagsbrun, the artist dryly hand-embroiders a replica of Victorian artist George Frederic Watts\u2019s \u201CMinotaur\u201D (1885), removing the original\u2019s moralistic tone (it was meant as an allegory about child prostitution) and picturing the Minotaur gazing longingly out to sea, as if wanting to escape his own labyrinth. Reichek captions it with a quote from Borges: \u201C'Would you believe it, Ariadne!' said Theseus. 'The Minotaur scarcely defended himself.'\u201D In this mixed-up version, Theseus is the predator, and the Minotaur is Ariadne, abandoned and hoping for rescue. The success of Reichek's work is to unmoor these stories in our minds, loosening their tropes and making everything slippery, moving stable meaning just out of reach.&amp;nbsp;Elaine Reichek's  Ariadne's Thread  is on view at&amp;nbsp;Nicole Klagsbrun, 534 West 24th Street, through March 24[content:advertisement-center]&amp;nbsp;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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