Contingency plan, backup, second string, or—in the case of the former Volta art fair—Plan B. Due to structural issues with the West Side piers, Volta was forced to suddenly cancel its 2019 iteration. The fair’s organizers declined to relocate to a different venue, citing the potential damage such a move could do to their “brand image”, although it’s unclear what they imagined might be worse than looking like they don’t care about their exhibitors. Some of the former fair’s participants quickly put together an alternative—putting Plan B in effect—in Chelsea, including space provided by David Zwirner. Plan B is an art fair stripped down to the model’s essentials. Absent are the usual accoutrements veteran fair-goers have grown used to seeing, such as VIP lounges, overpriced refreshments, and – ahem – walls.

Without partitions separating a gallery’s space from its surroundings, Plan B’s atmosphere less resembles the white cubicles of the Volta of yore as it does a group exhibition at a gallery. Each exhibitor’s allotted space is loosely demarcated, and it’s up to the viewer to determine which artworks belong together. Takiru Shiferaw’s Money (Cardi B) (2018) stands in the middle of the floor and could belong next to any of the works surrounding it. Alaina Simone Incorporated intended that it be viewed alongside USNEA: Material/Form Test (2019) by Tahir Carl Karmali, a wall-based installation of draped mosquito netting and pulp made from immigration paperwork. Perhaps, in an alternate reality with lax structural regulations, the two would have shared a little niche at Volta, secluded from the rest of the work in the fair, but as things are, they share the gallery with everything else.

Other exhibitors have less ambiguous boundaries: Frodo Mikkelsen’s four silver-plated skulls, shown by SFA Projects, aren’t likely to be lumped in with any other space’s offerings. Each skull supports a small domestic landscape scene, like a house with trees and a yard or a hunting lodge in the woods. These scenes have hidden secrets, though: One house has a dinosaur skull underneath it (a skull buried in a skull), and another house sits atop a cache of gemstones, visible through the skull’s eye sockets.

Slag Gallery’s space is packed with a variety of paintings, small and large, by Dumitru Gorzo. His Slant series features colorful shapes and patterns painted on otherwise brooding figures and scenes. The contrast between melancholy underpainting and vibrant surface interventions makes the results look like the work of multiple artists, like the Chapman Brothers’ infamous alterations to original prints from Goya’s Disasters of War. One layer responds to another with playful parody, as with the bug-like features added to figures in Slant 5 and Slant 2, or more abstractly: Slant 6 is divided up according to the spatial logic of Francis Bacon, with a scaffold of lines isolating the figure’s head from the rest of the composition.

Okeksiy Sai’s digital prints on aluminum, shown by Kyiv’s Voloshyn Gallery, combine form and content in a unique manner: his blocky, pixelated scenes of office life are rendered in Microsoft Excel, a spreadsheet program transformed into an artistic tool. Excel provides the user with a malleable matrix that can hold combinations of text, numerical data, and in this case, blocks of color. Close up, each of Sai’s works looks like a block chart with an undecipherable color-coding scheme labeling areas of multi-lingual text, numbers, and code snippets. Scenarios of office life emerge with distance, mundane scenes made in a mundane program, made extraordinary by their overwhelming conceptual tedium.

Art fairs can be dreary particularly to those of us who are obligated to attend them several times a year and pretend to be excited by each one. Plan B, however, feels genuinely exciting even to this jaded art fair attendee. The minimalism enforced by sudden re-organization lends Plan B a unique sensibility among the Armory Week offerings. The fact that it was successfully put together on such short notice is testament to the dedication of its organizers and participants, and perhaps that palpable sense of commitment is what makes Plan B stand out amid the art fair scene’s vapid decadence.

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Lampe: September 5 to October 20, 2018
Chillag: September 5 to December 8, 2018
190 Orchard Street, between Stanton and East Houston streets
New York City, elizabethhoustongallery.com

The idea of an unidentifiable portrait would likely have seemed strange to the old masters, as portraiture used to be functional—depicting the sitter’s wealth and power—rather than a mainly aesthetic genre. How does anonymity affect how a painting or portrait is viewed? An old-master portrait of an obscure noble might as well be anonymous to a viewer today, as the details of his or her life have probably been lost to time. Does knowledge of the name behind the face change anything at all? In partially overlapping shows at Elizabeth Houston Gallery, Katinka Lampe and Colin Chillag each presented portraits of nameless sitters.

Lampe’s portraits, in a show that closed October 20, have the flatness and slickness of TV screen. The sitters appear still, yet a slight motion-blur effect gives their faces a sense of movement, evident in 5065184 (2018) and 6080171 (2017). This effect recalls the interlacing found in analog video, in which individual frames are split in two, scanline by scanline, and each resulting frame becomes a flickering superimposition of these halves. The screen may appear still, but the image itself is in constant motion; it cannot stop shifting between the two moments that constitute it. Lampe’s portraits exhibit this sense of still motion or moving stillness. Each sitter’s face stays perfectly motionless but the blurring effect creates its own shivering action, an inner restlessness or akathisia brought to the surface.

Her sitters aren’t given names, but each painting is titled with a seven-digit number. The significance of each number is left up to the viewer’s imagination: is it some kind of serial number or sequence, or a date, or something completely random with no significance or meaning at all? Regardless, it stands in place of a name and allows each sitter to hide his or her identity behind this inscrutable code. Despite their anonymity, Lampe’s subjects exude personality. 6080179 (2017) show the back of a girl’s head and her complicated (perhaps physically impossible) hairstyle. Her pearl earring recalls Vermeer, but the act of facing away from the viewer recalls Goya’s Charles IV and Family from 1800. As the story goes, the sitter facing the wall was the hypothetical future wife of Fernando VII.

Like Lampe’s work upstairs, Chillag’s paintings in the basement gallery defy portraiture’s historical functionality. His reimaginings of school portraits twist and distort an already awkward moment. Chillag captures the process of metamorphosis in these baby-teeth grins, the beginning of an uneasy pupation between larva and imago. High-key backdrops merge with each sitter’s face like a chroma-key shot gone awry, fragmenting both figure and ground as in Portrait of a Girl 2 (2018). If Lampe’s portraits have the shimmering effect of an analog freeze-frame, then Chillag’s are digital glitches. His distortions provide a second layer of anonymity to his subjects. Not only are they not given names, but their faces are rippled and warped to the point that facial-recognition technology would likely be rendered useless. Chillag’s sitters remain safe in their cocoons, their identities virtually unknowable and untouchable aside from those closest to them in real life.

Aside from his portraits of individual girls, Chillag shows two larger paintings based on classroom group photos. In Class Portrait (2018) the students’ flesh and clothing merges into an amorphous pink mass, and a meandering brown line connects their fragmented figures like a route on a map. The students have been taken apart and put back together again with some pieces misplaced in the process. The other group painting, It is important to be Nobody (2018) displays a selection of relatively intact students sitting on bleachers with their hands in their laps or standing in the back rows. Blobs of opaque paint obscure parts of the figures and reveal others in an apparently arbitrary manner, although any overall logic can’t be known without knowledge of the source material or the sitters.

Maybe all portraits are ultimately anonymous, or at least not tied to a particular identity. After all, the sitter isn’t actually on the canvas or in the picture plane, as he or she has an independent existence outside the image that can’t be fully depicted. The sitter is not necessarily the subject of the painting: The depiction is a messy merger of the sitter and the artist and their combined visions, images, and subjectivities. If a name makes a difference, it is on a historical or personal level. The name exists outside the frame, floating tethered to the image, a delicate connection bound to snap at any moment.

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Jason Stopa (quoted from the press release of the present exhibition) speaks of his paintings as “stages” in which “marks and images are actors acting in space”. If Stopa’s paintings are performative venues, this raises a question: has the performance concluded, or is it ongoing? Are Stopa’s stages the arenas of Action Painting, where the finished picture exists as a frozen testament to the act of its creation? Stopa’s works are not that simple. Activated by a colorful background in the gallery space, the paintings occupy one layer of a baroque abyss that is channeled inward—into pictures-within-pictures—and outward into our own reality.

Each of the seven paintings is hung against a red and yellow diamond pattern that covers the gallery’s walls, clearly painted by the same hand responsible for the canvases. Stopa’s brushwork is both affective and deliberate; like an actor who has rehearsed his lines a thousand times over, he looks to have put untold effort into making his performance appear effortless. The red lines and yellow fields unite the paintings while acting as a framing device. Much like an old master painting packed inside a gilded frame that’s weighed down with serifs and arabesques, Stopa’s paintings have indefinite boundaries between their depicted fiction and concrete reality. Two Views of Nature (2018) uses these same red lines to create the outline of a stage on the canvas, and Johari Window (2018) inverts the color scheme within its borders. Each painting is part of a larger entity and, in turn, contains other paintings within its interior space.

Two Views of Nature (2018) shows a pair of paintings placed en-abyme on a red and blue stage. The left-hand painting is linear and grass-like; the one on the right is calligraphic, black-on-yellow. This motif occurs again in Two Abstractions on a Stage, which features green pictures-within-pictures. Above each pair is a narrow window, the border of which has been extruded from a tube of paint. The paintings on the stages recall the placement of works in the gallery, but are a dimension removed from the actual canvases and exist only within another work’s diegetic space, like a play-within-a-play being performed on a fictional stage that is itself presented on an actual stage.

Another pair of paintings flips the viewpoint to show a possible audience or, at least, a space that could contain one. In the Pavilion (for Harold Budd) (2018) shows four rows of forms that resemble seat backs, and Syrian Damask Rose (Mushroom Cloud) (2018) has rows of staggered shapes that can also be seen as the work’s titular explosions. Facing the audience in some instances, and the stage in others, viewers occupy a paradoxical space between spectacle and spectator. We are outside the illusion depicted on the canvases yet within its walls at the same time. The paintings themselves balance on the knife’s edge between illusion and physicality, having their illusionistic spaces snapped back to flatness by areas of tubular impasto. Each of these paintings has a work placed en-abyme that echoes its dominant shape: an arch for Pavilion, and a mushroom cloud for Rose. These shapes are, like the windows in the stage paintings, applied straight from the tube and look heavy enough to peel away from the surface.

Another pair of paintings, The entrance to the gate (2018) and Johari Window, use the side-by-side, picture-in-picture format of the stage paintings while lacking their perspectival depth. The lines form diamond patterns—recalling the walls behind them—and vertical stripes that extend off the top of the canvas. The paintings en-abyme are mirrored between the two: Entrance has a green impasto “X” against a sunset-like gradient on the left, while Window has an extruded white diamond against a blue gradient on the right. Every work in the show has a doppelganger with the exception of The Big Picture (2018). Aptly titled, the large canvas contains eight representations of black-on-blue calligraphic paintings overlaid by one large pink and white one, outlined in yellow impasto. Perhaps this painting’s twin is the exhibition itself: They are, after all, both large self-contained works with many paintings within their boundaries. Spectators in the gallery viewing Stopa’s work occupy both sides of the conceptual divide between performers and audience. We are inside the work looking out, by virtue of being surrounded by it, while simultaneously being outside looking in at a fictional world. The performance thus continues; a fictional audience watches us from the painted theater as we gaze back at them.

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Superfine is a mélange of amateur and professional artists hawking their wares in an environment more akin to an arts and crafts fair than anything resembling Frieze. One artist whose work stands out is Yanjun Cheng: In her haunting four-foot square painting, A Child (2018), a partial head emerges from the darkness to stare through visitors behind mismatched opalescent eyes that fail to return the viewer’s gaze.

Superfine: 459 West 14th Street, east of 10th Avenue, May 2-6, superfine.world

Art New York, on Pier 94, is packed with blue chip art, much of it bought by mega-collectors before the public was even allowed in. Aside from these predictable offerings, there were booths showing selections of less conventional art fair fare. Large blurred paintings by the Miaz Brothers (born Milan, living and working in Valencia) stand out in Miami’s Fabien Castanier Gallery’s booth: While these works resemble out-of-focus Gainsborough or Ingres portraits, the compositions are apparently original and, unexpectedly, not lifted from art history.

Art New York at Pier 94 through May 6

 

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January 12 to February 11, 2018
106 Forsyth Street, between Grand and Broome streets
New York City, lylesandking.com

Technological singularity—the point at which the velocity of advancement reaches infinity—is, some say, close at hand. The manner in which innovation accelerates, with new discoveries speeding up further progress, is similar, perhaps not coincidentally, to compound interest. Moore’s Law predicted a doubling of circuit transistor density every two years, a trend that—despite pesky limitations like the size of individual atoms—seems accurate for the foreseeable future. The human body, in comparison, naturally advances on an evolutionary timescale, measured by incremental changes over thousands or millions of years. How can humanity compete with this insane pace? Are we doomed to become slaves to our creations as in so many sci-fi dystopias? Rather than seeing this scenario as a conflict between man and machine, these advancements could be thought of as augmenting our humanity, as in transhumanism, or as an indistinguishable addition to the increasingly meaningless category of “the human” as in some lines of posthumanist thought. Chris Dorland’s work, on view at Lyles & King, seems to be in line with this latter interpretation. His Alumacore prints and video works, created using layers of images altered by digital glitches, merge human and digital actions into a single substance is neither one nor the other.

Openness to chance occurrences is hardly new in art: Building on Dada and Surrealist experimentation, Francis Bacon threw handfuls of paint at his canvases to disrupt his existing imagery while John Cage performed on prepared pianos designed to produce random sounds. A glitch isn’t simple randomness, however: it is the intersection and confusion of multiple processes, like a machine misinterpreting data meant for some other use, or a circuit that allows its signal to be altered by outside noise. In whatever way a specific glitch may have been cultivated, it represents the “will” of digital processes altering, if not overpowering, that of the humans who created such systems in the first place. Dorland’s broken and hacked machines are his co-creators, and while the artist ultimately has the final say on how each piece turns out, these decisions are influenced by their non-human digital labor.

Can Dorland’s human touch be visibly distinguished from the digital logic of a machine? Untitled (Overclock) (2017) features a woman’s eyeless face, seemingly lifted from a makeup ad, distorted in a manner indicating that it was moved around while being scanned. This is the only recognizable image in the piece: Everything else is abstract. and while it seems to follow a certain logic (such as the vertical division between fields of red and blue), any larger human meaning is lost in an inscrutable pile of digital artifacts. Untitled (Drone Psychic) (2017) practically forces an abstract reading of its imagery, lacking any clues to the sources of its densely-layered and distorted material. There are several painterly passages in which skeins of acidic color ooze and flow together, but what these “brushstrokes” may actually be must remain a mystery, with any identifying information having been corrupted or deleted in the piece’s creation.

Played on a TV leaning against the wall, Dorland’s video Untitled (memory cortex) (2017) is a montage of glitched imagery in motion. Snippets of occasionally legible text—computer code and Japanese message board comments—float above footage from a first-person shooter video game as its color palette jumps between the red, green, and blue channels of computer graphics output. Any details about the game’s narrative are hidden in a swirling mass of images and text overlaying the already distorted footage.

Dorland’s work can be appreciated as abstraction, but pieces of images hint at deeper processes behind their generation. Untitled (Drift Upload) (2017) has bits of racecars splayed across its surface, disrupted by red blocks and horizontal black lines. A spiderweb of shattered glass, like the cracked screen of a smartphone, breaks the picture’s upper-right corner. Most of the prints feature such fractures, reminders of the broken border between the two worlds we regularly inhabit. The world depicted through Dorland’s work isn’t a cyberpunk dystopia as popularized in sci-fi, but it isn’t the utopia-for-profit envisioned by Silicon Valley “tech bros” either. It is more akin to an atopia, a place without borders or boundaries, like a broken screen trying, and failing, to keep separate the “real” and the “digital.”

The post The Willful Glitch: Chris Dorland and Technological Singularity appeared first on artcritical.

When art historians speak of “the Nude,” they are generally referencing the classical tradition of representing the unclothed, usually female, body in painting and sculpture. The Nude is an academic exercise in restraint in which the body is separated from its sexuality and subjectivity in favor of a detached view of it as an aesthetic object. “Nudes,” as the term is used today in reference to erotic selfies, operate essentially in reverse, oozing sexual affect but lacking overt aesthetic pretensions. While nudes are functional digital objects, their purposes are as varied as the people who send and receive them. Some nudes are used teasingly or flirtatiously, perhaps in the context of a long-distance relationship, or sent unsolicited as a form of harassment; some may be created for an exhibitionistic thrill, while others become “revenge porn” leaked online in a betrayal of trust. Frances Waite’s drawings, on view at Elijah Wheat Showroom in Bushwick, depict the artist posing in various states of undress. Drawn from photographs that are left unseen and featuring paintings that don’t exist, her work operates at the intersection of the Nude and nudes, using her technical abilities in depicting the former to explore the provocative power of the latter.

Frances Waite has been working in this manner for a few years: Previously she solicited anonymous donations of selfies and nudes as source material for a series of drawings. This project got some online press coverage that emphasized its sensationalistic overtones—the “look what kids these days are doing” school of clickbait journalism—or played to the trope of the artist as savior, framing Waite’s intention as being to elevate these images from sinful internet garbage to valuable, “real” art. Whatever the interpretation, selfies became drawings and were moved from the camera roll to the gallery wall, and in that transformation glancing snapshots of body parts were solidified into line and tone through the artist’s hand. Whether this is an elevation or a lateral shift in context is up for debate.

In the years since, Waite has turned inward to focus on images and representations of herself. Elijah Wheat Showroom’s largest wall holds an arrangement of her drawings that recalls a phone’s camera roll. Within the pictorial space of each drawing are images of paintings she never made, a mise-en-abyme scenario of pictures in pictures in pictures. Some of the hypothetical paintings are done in a charming illustrative style that Waite has cultivated alongside her other bodies of work, as in Me Waiting to be Fucked by a Boy That Wants to Love Me Under A Painting I Never Made Called “She Said Yes” (2017), which depicts the naturalistically-rendered, topless artist posed rear-up beneath a large painting that features a penis-headed man holding his hands over a naked woman’s mouth.

Another drawing, Cumshot That’s Not Interested in Landing on a Painting I Never Made of Nothing In Particular (2017), shows a view from the other side of the proverbial looking glass in which a realistic drawing of the artist kneeling on the sofa hangs in a perspectivally-unique bedroom, to be used as a cartoon character’s onanistic inspiration. Probably Born to Take Care of You with a Painting I Never Made Called “Something About Men Always Making Me Into a Mommy by Any Means Necessary” (2017) shows what might be a tender moment between two worlds in which the artist, sitting awkwardly on the back of a sofa, offers her breast to a figure in the painting next to her. Ultimately, neither of these dimensions can be considered the “real” one, as they are both fictional to us on this side of the frame.

It would be cliché to suggest that the variety and density of imagery in Waite’s drawings is emblematic of our time, but it’s difficult to see her work outside the context of the post-Weinstein moment. In contorting ourselves to see them as something else, perhaps as unaffecting aesthetic objects or as unartistic post-internet pastiche, their complexity and tension falls out of view. Waite has put her body on display in a show of public intimacy, and the resulting images, drawn by her own hand, have been twice filtered through her subjectivity. Sharing pictorial space with her imagined and unrealized paintings, she presents herself on her own terms, something that many “Nude” models, or some subjects of “nudes,” aren’t able to do.

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October 20 – November 19, 2017
1329 Willoughby Avenue, between Wyckoff and St Nicholas avenues
Bushwick, tigerstrikesasteroid.com

The baroque was seen as a decadent deviation from the rational purity of classicism that preceded it during the Renaissance and followed it as neo-classicism. As the classical decayed it sprouted strange new forms of painting, sculpture, architecture, and writing that were inspired by more than just the Greco-Roman tradition: The baroque was a global style that, while influential for about a century in Europe, retained its presence in the colonial New World for significantly longer. It was the first style that could be seen as pluralistic, and many colonized peoples created their own versions of it, referred to by theorist William Egginton as Coloneobaroque. These include varieties of the baroque that exist between eras and cultures and manifest to this day in such forms as the literature of Magic Realism and other post-colonial manifestations that twist and distort the classical forms imposed by the colonizers. In Haitian-American artist Didier William’s exhibition at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, We Will Win, this distortion is put on display in a series of materially-diverse paintings. The figures that inhabit them are wriggling conglomerations of cellular eyes carved into the paintings’ inky black surfaces, never totally whole but held in some fragile stasis that keeps them from falling apart.

One large horizontal painting, inhabiting its own wall in the back of the gallery, depicts four such figures side-by-side. The left two stand in contrapposto with their gazes locked towards the viewer (at least, from the eyes on their faces). The rightmost two figures are locked in combat or a dance or some combination thereof, pushing the other’s head away. Each contorts in an effort to repel the other, but in the process the boundaries between their bodies become ambiguous as their cells mingle together.

Hanging around the corner from this piece are two colorful paintings, one large and one small. The larger one depicts two figures —vibrantly dressed in identical striped shirts and orange patterned pants— standing behind a stage-like wooden platform. A veil of blue dots floats before them at waist-level, with strands of blue paint dripping down onto the stage, abstract expressionist-style. These seemingly accidental splatters are given a sense of intentionality and dimensionality with the inclusion of their delicate smoky shadows on the surface of the wooden planks: The blue strings float and dance in three dimensions, not as marks on the surface but within the picture’s diegetic space. The smaller painting hanging to its left similarly plays with shadows: A figure, with its body and face completely covered with carved-out eyes, peers out from behind a blue patterned curtain. A shadow is cast behind the figure: Is it his/hers, or is it from someone else standing outside the frame? The curtains cast no shadows next to it, leaving its identity ambiguous.

Less ambiguous is an overt reference to Jacques-Louis David’s masterpiece Death of Marat in which the central figure is presented not as a martyr to the French Revolution but emerging victoriously from the bathtub. Rather than an assassin’s dagger, the figure clutches a machete, a distinctively new-world weapon/implement in a neo-classical space. Its foot squirms out of the bathtub and onto Marat’s makeshift writing desk, with the tip of the silver machete resting behind its heel. This new figure is a shadow of Marat: Black, not white; emerging rather than submerging; alive instead of dead. Even its head is tilted in the opposite direction, moving forward, not sinking back into the bath. France’s revolution may have been dead in the water, so to speak, but the slave uprising it helped inspire in Haiti continued into the reign of Napoleon and ended with the French being driven off the island in a historically unique example of slaves overthrowing their captors and establishing an independent state: We Will Win, indeed.

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39 White Street
September 13 to October 7, 2017

Frustrated vision can actually be fun: Take Peekaboo for example, a “game” exploiting a child’s anxiety over the apparent loss of a caregiver and subsequent joy over their sudden return. A possibly more mature version of this, depending on who you ask, would be striptease. There, the eroticism is not found in the “strip” side of the equation — in the visibility of the performer’s body — but in the “tease,” the increase, release, and frustration of tension between things visible and concealed. Rachel Rickert’s paintings, on view at E.TAY Gallery in TriBeCa, play within these parameters, via the stripping and/or covering of the female body, and through the painterly materiality of the works themselves.

The figures in Rickert’s paintings are shown neither fully nude nor fully dressed. Each one is somewhere between those two states, in the process of removing or putting on a shirt (or tights in the case of Damsel in Distress). In a series of five small canvases this action is frozen at a vulnerable moment in which the model’s head is cocooned in fabric, blocking her vision while opening up her body to the viewer’s gaze. Devour depicts a moment of claustrophobia through an impression of the eyes, nose, and mouth visible through the tight fabric that encases the model’s head. In the painting to its left, Veil, the figure’s breasts and left arm are exposed while her head and right arm strain against a garment that looks liable to rip apart at any moment.

A gold patterned shower curtain shows up in a suite of three paintings: Soft Boundaries has it drawn to one side to reveal a nearly life-sized nude woman standing in a bathtub, struggling — as in the smaller paintings — to extricate her head from a damp shirt. On the opposite end of the gallery is Verge, a painting of similar scale that shows the curtain pulled closed, save for the bath tile peeking out from around its edges. The third piece, Border, is the smallest painting in the show and focuses on a fragment of the curtain’s gold diamond pattern. A similar motif is echoed in another large painting, the aforementioned Damsel in Distress, which doesn’t feature the curtain itself but has a blue diamond-patterned mattress, flopped against a wall, as a backdrop for the figure’s battle against a pair of black tights.

The curtain represents a physical boundary beyond which sight is frustrated or negated altogether. There are a few pieces in the show that implore the viewer to maintain a similar distance. Two large paintings depicting close-up views of lingerie — Nude and Big Girl — feature delicate lace that only coalesces into recognizability from afar; moving closer to the canvases collapses the patterns into abstract swirls of pink or black. One might assume that a close-up examination, scrutinizing every detail, would reveal more than a glance from across the room, but these paintings frustrate that expectation, like trying to view the Nazca Lines (pre-Columbian geoglyphs in Peru) from ground level rather than from the air.

The strange pleasure that comes from visual frustration is a recurring theme in this exhibition. While Soft Boundaries and Verge present its two extremes with the curtain drawn and closed, respectively, and the body completely exposed or concealed, there are any number of intermediaries between those states: the smaller shirt paintings, for instance, with exposure and concealment superimposed on each other in a state of indeterminacy. The lingerie paintings give this dynamic a material basis, encouraging the viewer’s interaction with the painting to find a “sweet spot” from which to view it. Even from an optimal position one cannot see everything, but that’s part of the fun: If everything were perfectly visible, what pleasure would there be in looking?

The post Peekaboo: Rachel Rickert at E.TAY Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

August 3 to 19, 2017
254 Broome Street, between Orchard and Ludlow streets
New York City, castorgallery.com

Upon meeting for the first time, even before greetings are exchanged, strangers form conscious or subconscious impressions of each other. Accurate or not, these momentary decision based on visual cues color further interactions. Castor Gallery’s aptly-named summer exhibition, Strangers, curated by Emma Frank, presents a room full of faces and figures where none of the engagement of traditional portraiture has been allowed. The viewer is obstructed and frustrated by a variety of visual devices that prevent the depicted subjects from returning their gaze.

Jesse Draxler uses a traditional portrait format — showing the sitter’s head and shoulders — but his “portraits” are non-functional beyond this formal coincidence. All of his subjects have their heads turned from the viewer: Some barely shift from a profile view, and others almost totally face away. All of the heads are presented in silhouette, painted black and lacking any obvious markers of sex, ethnicity, or personality. The subject’s head in Consciousness Antenna III (2017), turned away and looking down, appears to be covered by a skintight hood; a black line runs from the base of the skull down the figure’s spine. The left-hand figure in Living with a Ghost (2017) has the same stripe, but the nearly identical figure to its right — its doppelgänger — is painted completely black, a shadow standing in the foreground.

In her large-scale painting Tell Me You Love Me (2017), Krista Louise Smith likewise presents a double “portrait” with a disruptive twist. An exquisitely-painted nude, rendered in oils from groin to neck, embraces a second woman tentatively carved out of negative space. The leftmost figure’s breasts and depilated vulva are presented in detail, yet her head lies teasingly outside of the frame in an inversion of traditional portraiture and its focus on the face’s expressiveness. The ghostly figure serves as an opposite: She is shorter, has pubic hair, her face is in the frame, and she stands in profile rather than facing the viewer. The edge of a painted hand is wrapped around her belly, a loose embrace that prevents her from slipping out of reach.

The figure in Smith’s painting appears ghostly, but two other artists use literal translucency in their work: Anthony Goicolea’s Anonymous Self Portrait (2016) depicts the artist removing (or possibly putting on) an opaque shirt on an otherwise see-through resin panel. The shadows painted on the panel mingle with the literal shadows cast by the light passing through it. Juan Miguel Palacios also uses translucency in his work, but his panels are layered on top of damaged sheets of drywall. His Wound series of paintings show the figures’ heads floating on layers of vinyl atop a literally wounded ground in a tense fusion of the spectral and the material.

Mercedes Helnwein’s oil pastel works on paper present a different variety of ghostliness than the aforementioned paintings: She draws from vintage photographs and plays up the nostalgic sensations found within, yet subverts their narrative qualities with brightly-colored interventions. Queen of the Underground (2015) plays up the contrast between an illuminated figure and the shadowy background that surrounds her. The only substantial color to be found is a pink smear across her face, a mask that shows her eyes yet prevents the viewer from interpreting any expression she may have. Tiffany (2017) exhibits a similar tension: Helnwein has again layered a brightly-colored mass on top of the subject’s face. The vibrant orange scotoma hovering in front of her face doesn’t completely obscure her expression, but her glassy-eyed stare raises the question of whether she sees it, as well.

Even after spending ample time with these paintings, the figures depicted continue to resist recognition and remain strangers.. In this respect, the work in Strangers provides an amnesiac version of the experience of meeting someone for the first time, with its attendant anxieties and excitement, allowing the viewer to introduce themselves again and again.

The post Social Amnesia: Strangers, curated by Emma Frank appeared first on artcritical.

July 14 to 30, 2017
56 Bogart Street, between Grattan Street and Harrison Place
Brooklyn, blackandwhiteartgallery.com

“Synthesis” is a word with many context-dependent meanings: One can synthesize a chemical compound, wear a sweater made from synthetic fibers, or listen to electronic music generated by a synthesizer. Generally, though, the term implies the merger of two different things, as in the Hegelian dialectic, in which two opposing ideas — the thesis and antithesis — are resolved in their synthesis. Crossover, an exhibition of collaboratively-created work by Crystal Gregory and Alexa Williams, is synthetic in more ways than one. The work uses a variety of artificial materials whose properties clash with each other, only finding a tenuous resolution in the configurations on view in the gallery. On a deeper level, the show is a synthesis of the the two artists themselves, a duo with a working process that has become so collaborative that the question of “who made what?” is unanswerably meaningless.

Braids of metal wire — Crossover (2017) — span the gallery, blocking access to the center of the space. This divides the gallery in two, with each part made accessible by ducking under the cables at their highest points on either wall. They are slack and partially unwound, making apparent their new roles as art objects. Rather than holding up a suspension bridge, these cables hold the show together, linking the sides of the space and determining the visitor’s course through the exhibition.

Large concrete sculptures sit on either side of the cables. At the far end of the gallery is Both (2017), a duo of painted concrete rings tied together with a length of delicate red string. While the materiality of the rings is overwhelming — they could have been salvaged from an abandoned storm sewer — the thin string is the piece’s point of tension. Each ring leans away from the other, held together by this little wisp of lovingly tied thread that keeps them from both tumbling down. The other concrete piece is Curving (2017), a ring broken in two and dusted with fluorescent orange construction chalk. The halves of the ring rest on top of each other, tied together with another length of string that prevents it from becoming whole again. Both of these sculptures have a dual construction, whether it involves two rings or a single one broken in half. The two parts are awkwardly forced to become one, but this tenuous union could catastrophically collapse with the slightest provocation.

The installation piece Glory (2017) continues the theme of material juxtaposition, consisting of ceramic tubes of varying length placed atop a bed of construction chalk and leaned against the wall. The soft and fluffy chalk threatens to spread around the gallery space, liable to be tracked all over by careless visitors who wander too close. The ceramic tubes, for their part, look prone to double-over and snap in half. Their present precarious placement tells the story of their past malleability from before they were solidified in the controlled inferno of the kiln. These same fires activated the shiny black glaze on the exteriors of the tubes, giving them an illusory coating of gunmetal. This disguise, though, is interrupted by hints of their ceramic reality found in places where the glaze dripped or didn’t stick. Glory places the solid and the soft in a tense equilibrium, a balance that could be shattered by a sudden sneeze or a stray gust of air.

No amount of analysis of this show can answer the seemingly simple question of “who made what?” While the work was made collaboratively, neither artist has her metaphorical fingerprints on any given part of it. Each is an accomplished artist in her own right, and the work they made for this show isn’t characteristic of either artist’s larger body of work. Crossover, rather, represents a synthesis of their abilities, personalities, and individual artistic practices; a surprise reaction that has produced an unexpected yet welcome result.

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