Mary Nicholson's recent solo exhibition, organized by Rebecca Cela Smith, was entitled 'Oneanother Twoanother'.  Smith explains that the exhibition focused on cloning and featured work in which Nicholson continued "to explore the nebulous relationship between the digital era and the self."  

One of the highlights of the exhibition was My Dog and I, which features a dog with its head behind a laptop computer with an image of the dog's head on the screen of the laptop lined up in such a way as to create an almost complete and natural scene.  My Dog and I is reminiscent of Rene Magritte's famous painting "The Human Condition" (1934) which present a similar conundrum: the actual painting depicts a painting of a landscape on an easel which completes (almost seamlessly) a landscape which can be seen through a window behind the depicted painting.  Nicholson's work rephrases the question and ups the anti a bit with its reference to cloning and perhaps has suggestion to re-evaluate what is a human condition. 

Through the work, cloning and replication are approached from a number of directions.  Two bears held by a man refer to recent cloning experiments with animals.  By taking the great replicator Andy Warhol's "banana" image and having it face itself twice (one pairing above the other), Nicholson presents a pop-art double helix and opens the whole can of worms opened by  Warhol and, among many other sources, Walter Benjamin's more often referenced than read "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and the Human Genome Project.

Whitney Combs (NY Arts  April 2001)