After the mini-controversy stirred up over artist Christine Bailey's exhibition of faux Cara Ober paintings at a downtown office building last month, we were eager to check out Boundary Crossings, the current show at School 33 Art Center that Bailey curated. 

The show presents three artists -- Ariana Wol, Nadine Freund and "the international digital collective" A.N.N.A. -- who, on closer inspection, all turn out to be creatures of Bailey's own fertile imagination. During a phone conversation yesterday it only took a little prodding before she admitted that the show's trio of "artists" are, in fact, completely fictitious identities invented by her.

I suppose you could complain that Bailey's description of her role as "curator" is a bit misleading, since this is essentially a one-woman show put together by the artist herself. But if invented identities are what the exhibition is about anyway, why bother?

As Bailey's alter egos, Wol, Freund and A.N.N.A. turn out to be a pretty feisty bunch. Wol is a photographer and performance artist who documents her highly mutable identity in short films and still photographs. Freund is an animator and graffiti artist whose 20-minute video of a pine tree in a snowy landscape offers one of the show's most compelling visual experiences. The "collective" A.N.N.A. appropriates animated images of IKEA's bland, on-line customer service rep and lets her brush off callers' off-the-wall queries in an astonishing variety of languages.

Mark Twain called novelists the biggest liers that ever came down the pike, but the antics of Bailey's wholly fictitious "artists" may give them a real run for their money. We'll have a full review of the show next week, so stay tuned.

(Above: Still from projection work by Nadine Freund)