Risperidone is an antipsychotic medication prescribed to patients with a tendency to obsessive, self-abusive behavior. Janet Biggs chose it as the title of her three-channel video installation at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, which was screened in three adjacent bays, divided by curtains. This was not the installation's first showing; it had appeared at Team Gallery in Chelsea shortly after 9/11, and like several strong shows of the immediate post-disaster exhibition cycle, was overlooked. But this is hardly work that would have comforted jumpy New Yorkers. In five-minute sets, which loop indefinitely, Biggs, who has said she wishes this work to imitate the effects of psychosis under drugs, juxtaposes athletics and a landscape to devise a metaphor of fixated mental states and their merely intermittent soothing.
