January 5 to February 4, 2018
327 Broome Street, between Bowery & Chrystie Street
New York City, nicellebeauchene.com

Is painting in monochrome in 2018 retrograde? Jim Lee’s solo exhibition Half Off at Nicelle Beauchene seems to suggest as much as it fixates on the absurdity of this investigation. Lee explicates the perverse nature of painting monochromes (or painting itself) through tongue-in-cheek illustration of them. The paintings become physical manifestations of his casual approach and slapstick process and efforts to undermine the stoicism historically found in painting.

Uneven in texture, saturation, and hue, Lee’s paintings boast their apparent ineptitude: He unabashedly folds, staples, and tears lopsided seams, which feels irreverent given their nod to color-field abstraction and notions of purity. This is made meaningful by Lee’s use of different historically class-laden materials, such as oil paint and linen, intermixed with crass interlopers—Flashe, zone marking paint, visible staples, glitter, acrylic: lowbrow materials that feel deliberately applied to expensive supports that have been previously agitated and aggressively handled. The lowbrow materials occasionally impersonate highbrow ones or gesture over them, denouncing any aura of opulence implied by high quality. Lee’s works are biting their thumb at the elitism and purity bound to the stuffy history of the monochrome.

Highlighting the texture of the raw canvas or the slick plastic sheen of acrylic, mimicry and illusionism in Lee’s gestures double as surface depictions. Registered quickly for their tactile surface, their substance draws from deeper-rooted content, heavily contingent upon a viewer’s diligence. That they ask for a patient and persistent viewer can be seen in the paintings’ multifaceted intersections – these arise as time is spent with the works—whether between the digital and physical, humor and solemnity, elitism and the egalitarian. Lee’s surface quality, materials, gestures, and handling juggle anecdotes of the heavy baggage paintings can carry.

Intentionally or otherwise, Lee’s work often imitates the behavior or interaction a user has with an interface, such as manipulated screens that press against the picture plane and simultaneously recede into a deep space. A Cream Divide, split in half by conjoined canvas and linen, recalls a Photoshop preview dialogue box, de-saturating an image on the right half of its surface. The bright red panel on the left has a soft, blotchy red coating, unevenly mirrored by a seemingly darker red shaded by the underlying linen on the right panel. Similarly, in Safety and Senegal, Lee connects two distinct yellow surfaces of different prismatic intensity, sheen, and texture. Comprised of Flashe and zone marking paint, the lighter yellow intensified by its dark linen support, and conversely its light beige canvas, amplifies the deeper yellow. The physical and conceptual subtleties in Lee’s work invite the viewer to spend time with them, contradicting our expedited relationships to the information available via the screens alluded to in some of his works. Other paintings, such as Rutting Moon and Mr. Pleasant, inch closer to a “truer” monochrome with only a single color applied scrappily to a cobbled surface, appearing simple but still jabbing at traditional color-field painting.

Lee has provided his own bench from which viewers can fully absorb his faux monochromes. The same size as the paintings, the bench has printed on its seat a story from the artist’s hometown about a peeping tom and inevitable chaos that ensued. There is humor in peering around seated visitors in an attempt to read the text, mimicking a peeping tom’s mannerisms oneself. Looking back up at the paintings after reading the story feels like a violation of the paintings’ and artist’s privacy, and removes the deified objecthood to which works of art aspire. Paintings as an extension of oneself splayed out in a sterile gallery space is now re-imagined as unwelcome trespassing, but also realized as a necessary evil of continuing a sustainable art practice within a capitalist society. In this vein, the artist has provided a take home tee shirt emblazoned with the text “FCKER” for visitors to purchase. Who is the real fucker here?

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June 1 to July 8, 2017
326 Gallery
326 7th Avenue, New York, NY

What distinguishes the wooden slats running across a kitchen floor from those in a studio space or behind a construction site’s scaffolding wall? Dimensions Variable, curated by Brigitte Mulholland, challenges our conceptions of the domestic in relation to the world around us, addressing these separate functions as symbols of unique spaces. Eleanor King and Daniel Gerwin sliver their individual experiences of these environments and splice them together in a kaleidoscopic fashion.

Situated to the right of the gallery’s entrance, Daniel Gerwin’s amorphous paintings hang at various heights. They represent the artist’s refusal to adhere to traditional conventions of painting shape, size, depth, and presentation. Gerwin’s paintings incorporate moments of falsity and fabrication: Texture and mark-making impersonate architecture and adornments, suggesting domestic surfaces such as laminate wood slats or scuffed counter tops. This chaos is autobiographical for Gerwin, as he views these abstractions in relation to his experience of fatherhood.

Gerwin’s painting Two Kids and a Dog (2016) is hung low to the ground. Denial of standard hanging height operates beyond cheeky insubordination: The painting becomes a portal appropriately displayed for a child’s point of view. Refusal of convention is explored further with geometric abstraction coupled with layered panels and passages of squeegeed paint. Filled with contradictions, orderly geometric divisions pressing against the distorted picture plane provide reprieve from the piece’s otherwise chaotic composition. Jagged drawn sections and negative space (literally) cut out of the painting are combined on a multi-layered surface, emphasizing both implied and physical space. There is a constant push and pull between the layers of paint and the depth of the wood panel. Gerwin’s four neighboring paintings read similarly, acting as snapshots of his environment as a psychological space and energetic anecdotes about raising a child.

Situated parallel to Gerwin’s paintings is Eleanor King’s faux scaffolding wall, Undermine Everything (2017). Its green panels, as seen at construction sites across the city, symbolize cycles of development, renovation, and renewal, forming a shell that simultaneously signifies and masks an interior space during its metamorphosis. The text splayed across its surface is self-effacing, as the words “Undermine” and “Everything” are intertwined and italicized in opposite directions. The precision of the painted text starkly contrasts its intended message, which is either ironic or simply nonchalant about its own contradictions. Peppered throughout the exhibition are other text-based works that take a similar, if reduced, format as the larger green panels. Pieces reading “STANDFAST” and “TONIGHTS THE NIGHT” function in response to current events, specifically the obfuscation of information in a “post-truth” media environment.

The show’s installation produces a formal echo chamber between King’s solid green panels and the geometric sharpness of Gerwin’s variously shaped paintings, amplifying each artist’s unique way of looking at space. Eleanor King’s large installation, coupled with smaller text-based works, acts as a reflection of social transformation. The green construction walls are indicative of the constantly-shifting cultural dynamics of gentrification, development, and eviction.

Conversely, Daniel Gerwin’s paintings have an inward-looking, introverted aura. Still lively and energetic, his shaped artworks operate as a map of the domesticity of fatherhood as seen through the studio that now resides in his home. Dimensions Variable asks us to reassess the relationship between our physical environment, our psychological processing of it, and the larger cultural undercurrents shifting our inevitably ever-changing world.

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February 15 to April 22, 2017
9 North Moore Street, between West Broadway and Varick Street
New York City, saparcontemporary.com

Do artists have a responsibility to define humanity’s relationship towards the natural world? As invisible forces diminish the sustainability of our environment, we are all asked to reevaluate our destructive relationship to the world. This feels more vital than ever during these tumultuous times, with the growing threats of climate change denial and defunding of environmental research. Substance and Increase, an exhibition at Sapar Contemporary curated by Gregory Volk, showcases multiple projects by Shinji Turner-Yamamoto and Gabriela Albergaria that engage with the environment and socio-political climate without resorting to didacticism. The works on display do not directly align with preconceived notions of “the natural” and “the artificial”: The money green of Albergaria’s perspectival tree drawings and Yamamoto’s use of gold leaf may appear ostentatious, but their thoughtfulness undresses any such illusionism. Instead, they present a dynamic relationship between the physical environment and invisible forces – global capital, migration, and geological time – that shape our interaction with it.

Situated to the left of the gallery entrance, Yamamoto’s Constellaria series simultaneously places the viewer in the present and the past. Spanning vast gaps of ecological time, each of these surfaces compresses a large expanse of time into a single object. Their haptic surfaces utilize materials as varied as 450 million year old fossil dust, clay, and gold leaf, and are surrounded by cultured crystals erupting from the walls. These works visually echo Yamamoto’s Sidereal Silence (2016) project, a series of “paintings” that are indexical to the sites in which they were created. Immersed in a Yellow Springs, Ohio stream, the iron deposits left from the water’s unique ebb and flow effectively drew Sidereal Silence: Chalybeate #18 (2016). Marks made by the artist’s hands are, in Yamamoto’s work, barely distinguishable from those made by the environment. By growing crystals directly on the residue of human activity, such as formations of coal ash or plaster fragments from a deconsecrated church, his artworks emerge from the cooperation of artificial and organic, the aggregates suggesting man-made production as the new frame of reference for the natural.

Hung on the wall across from Yamamoto’s combinations of canvas and crystal, Gabriela Albergaria’s text based work reads, and is titled, MOST OF US ARE TRANSPLANTS UPROOTED FROM OUR NATIVE SOIL.(2016), directly confronting the viewer’s origins and asking the viewer to consider their own movements in light of contemporary immigration issues. Two more of Albergaria’s drawings, Distance between a Liriodendron Tulipifera (USA) and a Sugar Maple (Canada) at Brooklyn Botanic Garden (2017), and The Space Between a Sweet Gum (E. USA) and Another Sweet Gum (E. USA) at Brooklyn Botanic Garden (2016-2017) gently prod the concepts of being “native” as opposed to “foreign”. These drawings, meticulously hashed out in an off-key dark green, depict neighboring trees from different locations across the world growing towards each other, competing for resources as they arc towards the canopy and inevitably threaten their mutual existence.

On the gallery’s lower level, Yamamoto’s Pentimenti #56 (2017) is a golden aggregate made from fragments salvaged from an abandoned chapel in Ohio. Crystals, dragon’s blood, and gold leaf all imitate a priceless mineral, but it was actually assembled by Yamamoto; the artificial masquerading as the natural. Similar clusters of gilded debris hang in a row high up on the adjacent wall, reimagining abandoned detritus as sanctified icons. What was once discarded has been given affectionate care and ornamentation, calling on us to consider things so easily dismissed, and to acknowledge the function it once served for us.

Through Albergaria’s drawings of indigenous and foreign flora, and Yamamoto’s cultured crystals, this exhibition encourages us to reflect upon how our own origin stories are not always as simple as they may appear. Although the artists have different approaches to deconstructing the natural and native, the intersection of these methods sparks dialogue between both artists’ works. This bilateral response to artificiality prompts us to question reality and authenticity in relation to our environment and, maybe, ourselves.

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