Is there any material entity in this world that exists without a structure of some sort?  Arguably, the only time we ever truly escape the tangible element of structure is within our subconscious when we dream—although even there, Lacanians would argue, structure persists.  Exactly where the boundaries of the surrounding networks that immerse us lie are often not clearly defined or are so intertwined they shift seamlessly from one into the next.  The group show, “Hypothetical Landscapes,” (curated by Greg Lindquist) exhibits the work of eight different artists who create abstractions derived from physical systems that encompass us every time we open our eyes.  The artists — Miya Ando, Malado Baldwin, Don Gummer, Darina Karpov, Ati Maier, Dustin Schuetz, Rebecca Smith, and Suzanne Stroebe — create paintings and sculptures that carry a potency derived from the convergence of man-made networks with ones culled from nature.

In this exhibition, the grid is often employed to approach this convergence.  In Midnight Audit and View of the Defeated, (both 2009) Dustin Schuetz uses the grid to position an individual outside of the incessant force of commerce.  Inspired by the lighted skyscrapers of Manhattan viewed from the rooftop of his Brooklyn studio, Schuetz paints dissimilar gridded columns of ominous greens and yellows.  The groupings of squares and rectangles have slightly different sizes that slowly reveal subtle shifts of depth.  The paintings align themselves with Sarah Morris’s colorful gridded canvases that reflect the repetitious geometry of modern architecture.  However, unlike Morris, who places you up close and often within the structure, Schuetz’s perspective is at a distance and nocturnal.  This distance creates a sense of voyeuristic isolation as you peer from the shadows at structures of economy, and their interminable movement under the pulse of florescent lights.

Rebecca Smith’s Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica (2006) begins with a contradiction.  At first glance, the latticed network of flat steel bands, painted blue, and extending off the wall about one foot, has an airiness that is nowhere near the bulk and power of its eponymous glacial shelf. However, this grid is a fragmented one and the negative spaces in between Smith’s intersections and twists of metal stimulate contrasting feelings of largeness through lightness and expansion amongst fracture.  Although glaciers are dense and forceful entities, they also possess a nature that is inherently ethereal as they are made from water, float in our seas, and are disappearing rapidly.  The sculpture’s design brings to mind ideas of city planning, infrastructure, and the human movement occurring through these channels (all contributors to glacial melting), yet, as the piece floats by itself off the wall, it is also a disconnected fragment.  Through the use of metal, air, and our understanding of the grid, Smith sets up a system of contradictions to reference a seemingly solid structure, which could vanish tomorrow.

Don Gummer’s sculpture, San Ambrogio over Santa Maria delle Grazie (2004) excavates structural concepts from the past and reinvents them in a contemporary manner.  By superimposing the floor plans of two Milanese Renaissance churches, a matrical network emerges out Gummer’s reconfiguration of old ideas.  The overlapping 3 dimensional grids constructed from painted one-inch wooden rails, form a modular apparatus more congruent with pre-fabricated contemporary architecture than with the Vatican.  Gridded excavation is also utilized in Suzanne Stroebe’s freestanding sculpture, May I (2008).  Here the excavation comes in Stroebe’s collection of discarded objects – mostly fragments of wood one might find at a construction site.  The bits and pieces are upwardly assembled in a linear fashion calling to mind the figure while also referencing a torn electrical duct or a chunk of a building that has been blasted apart.

Two works by Ati Maier, Push (2007) and Level Out (2008), allude to movement amongst molecular structures in surrounding air particles.  Here, nebulous events and explosions burst and swirl above a landscape of colorful gridded planes, reminiscent of an early Atari game.  A confluence of elements between the terrestrial and atmospheric occurs that is coincidental and ceaselessly fluctuating at an atomic level.  Further organic organization intermixes with human activity in Darina Karpov’s small watercolors on paper, Untitled IV (sudden appearances into vanishing) (2008) and The Trickster (2009).  With exquisite detail and soft coloring, Ms. Karpov creates a biomorphic system that creeps and twists across the paper’s surface like kudzu taking over a tree or landscape.  Embedded within her leafy networks are miniscule landscapes, warring figures, and linear sprawls referencing both veins and rivers.  On a scale that shifts from micro to macro, these works speak of the unavoidable marriage between struggle and the structures of growth.

Miya Ando and Malado Baldwin conjure ideas of environments tainted by the synthetic in a post-human age.  Ando’s 04.09.51.38 (2009) fuses a minimalist landscape on a thin sheet of steel by adjusting the metal’s properties through lacquer, pigment, and patinas.  A sharp metallic horizon is formed carrying a carbonous black haze.  Baldwin’s ghostly abstracted vistas lack human presence of any kind except for the toxicity of their unnatural colors.

In this show of supposed landscapes, the question of what constitutes a landscape and where its boundaries are identified comes into question.  The work stems from the systems humans develop to navigate, control, and discern both their physical and perceptual domains as well as how these places intertwine with the design of nature.  In this way, a landscape is revealed where the natural world, the man-made realm, and the space of the mind coalesce.

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Over the last three decades, Nancy Haynes has developed a body of abstract work that utilizes a painting’s inherent materiality to cause a surface to shift from being a plane that is looked at, to becoming an area that is peered into.  Visually, her work calls to mind Gerhard Richter’s mechanized methods of applying paint to a surface and isolating brush marks, along with Brice Marden’s minimalist sensibility and handling of edges.  With her current show, “Dissolution,” Haynes presents a series of paintings that she refers to as “dark matter.”  In these paintings, darkness becomes a facilitator of light as Haynes employs a palette of terrestrial ores, impenetrable blacks, arctic blues, and steely grays to subtly shift, float, dissolve, and illuminate, all the while coaxing contemplation.

The velvety surfaces of Haynes’ small rectangular works are constructed by overlapping nuanced fields of color thinly painted with a wide, flat brush and straight movements.  In most cases, the color fields hold a directional light that transpires either from left to right, right to left, or from the center outward, with their brushed margins stopping just short of the painting’s edge.  In this way, a void is suggested while the veil of the hovering chromatic plane thwarts one’s entrance.  The effect is similar to peering into a Ganzfeld experiment or a dense fog that has trapped in it the ambient hues of the oncoming night.

In works like Shadow Syndrome (all works 2008), where a crisp glacial blue illuminates from right to left over a sea of piney grays, and Syntax where a smoky green-gold haze fades in and out of a richly saturated background, the separation between the planes of color is more pronounced making these works, at first glance, visually more striking than others in the gallery.  However, this is not a show for the impatient viewer and when given more than a glance it’s easy to become infatuated with the delicate tonal shifts of leaden grays in a painting like Liminal Monologue or the dark light emanating from the temperature shifts in the black on black painting, Echo.

As one grasps the combination of flatness, space, and light in Haynes’ paintings, the subtleties of her sophisticated palette and tonal gradations reveal a seductive luminosity.  Through this examination one’s mind empties out, leaving oneself in a contemplative state.  Or perhaps better put, one becomes fully engaged in the moment– peering simply into the painting’s surface while marveling at the unique and nuanced light held by each work.

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