Mintz: April 25 to June 4, 2019, 441 W 26th Street, between 9th and 10th avenues, hudsonguild.org
Raina: April 12 to May 12, 2019, 191 Henry Street, between Clinton and Jefferson streets, assemblyroom.nyc

Formal, compositional decisions can makes strange bedfellows. At first, it may seem odd to pair photographer Tommy Mintz, who utilizes an algorithm to generate temporally structured pastiches of sidewalk and urban life In New York, and Kaveri Raina, a painter who layers acrylic and graphite skeins onto burlap, seeking to approximate a sense of the confusion of cultural assimilation but bear with me for the commonalities are instructive.

Mintz’s photographs  utilize an algorithm which filters frames from a stop motion camera set-up— a process which he calls the “Automated Digital Photo Collage” or ADPC—rendering sequences of moving bodies on the sidewalk. The algorithm is empowered to snip and collage the parts of the figure and the background that move. Each motion is captured every few seconds as a disembodied snippet, one that grows out of the previous abstract but recognizable form, creating bizarre growth patterns reminiscent of emanating fungal colonies and sedimentary strata. These plodding biological processes are reflected, ironically, in the recording of the most fleeting moments and interactions.

Rather than yielding authority to a machine, Kaveri Raina,  in her exhibition at Assembly Room earlier this spring, , played with segments—body parts vaguely discernible as silhouettes and blocks them out in solid bright colors–that she rests on the surface of her chosen substrate, burlap. In a deft usage of material made famous by Gauguin she exploits the open weft and weave of the fabric to highlight the opacity and materiality of her paint. Her solid segments of color stick to the eye like floating afterimages and counter the sketchy forms she draws in between and over her color forms in graphite and pastel on the unforgiving textile. These bodies at which she hints—composites of painting and drawing–flicker between being and nothingness but generally seem to depict bodies engaged in a solitary dance, as well as fruits like lemons, and enigmatic shapes. Still, like Mintz’s tumbling Duchampian (think Nude Descending A Staircase) or Futurist hybrid forms and shards of bodies in motion, we become obsessed with the parts that tell the story, not the whole.

While Raina finds in the burlap a soft and giving but equivocal base on which not only to paint, but to draw and inscribe, Mintz also disambiguates his subject, the cityscape, one that should be eminently recognizable to a New York audience.  He prints on metal, a choice wherein the sheen of the aluminum peeks through the parts on the image which are lighter and less pigment-heavy, often arbitrarily confusing form and ground.  Both artists play at accidental diagramming. In Raina’s case, this happens via ghost drawings on the surface, as for example in Le Mon to Hover (2019) where heads and shoulders, arms, hips and thighs, and a lemon are caught in a miasma of gritty pencil glosses. Monochromatic grey additions force a circular movement on the dismembered form, as well as overlaying a phantom being with a single staring eye, evoking a sensation of self-consciously going through the motions, or perhaps a sense of joy with a tinge of paranoia. Mintz’s ADPC is itself the all-seeing eye, and while it does surveil, it does so through an artificial specificity emerging from the mathematical precision of his program, and often at bizarre angles such as the Worm’s Eye View in ADPC of Chelsea Hotel (2016). We watch human being going about their daily routines, talking to each other and checking one another out, but the level of frenetic energy increases top down: from the semi-stable edifice of the Chelsea hotel to a bottom zone composed of literal cartoonish speed-lines generated by fast moving feet, cars and bicycles.

Like Duchamp and the Futurists, motion seems to be the focus of both artists, along with a warm, very present notion of life in motion. Mintz, a life-long New Yorker trained in dance as well as photography, is intrigued by the infinite choreographic iterations possible, à la Poincaré, that are manifest in a passing moment, or, I guess in a New York minute. He does this particularly well in ADPC of 28th Street and 10th Avenue (2018) as we watch a contractor remove his white hard hat and adjust a sign in the absence of time. Raina, who left her native India age 11 to come to the USA, seems intrigued by presenting the swirl of cultures and insecurities present in a dual-life. Le Mon Orange, to Hover (2019) foregrounds an Orange and a tree—a bucolic note, possibly a residual memory.  Behind and around this visual diad arms and legs flail in various degrees of readability: some are surface-painted, others are painted on the back of the burlap and seep through—in the confusion of transition, her mind is on the past, on origins. Her color and material choices arise from the raw materials and cuisine of India.

One place where the two artists differ vastly is in the intentionality of their composition. Mintz sees the algorithm, his ADPC, as an excuse to allow for a somewhat overwhelming degree of detail, and the attending confusion—his foreground is littered with bodies and body parts, as in ADPC of 23rd and 7th Ave (2018) keeping with his aesthetic of scientific data faithfully rendered.  We are required to read the forms like trails in a cloud chamber, some are clear in their trajectory and classification while others are open to interpretation. Raina’s approach is to present a smaller case study, dispensing with the idea of background or three-dimensional space. These studies may be composed of forms which contradict each other in scale, such as a tree, a body or a lemon, but the action arises from the singular interaction of these parts. Each piece is a monologue whose character study is further explicated by the drawn annotations of swirls, cyclones and graphite whirlpools, especially noticeable in the series of drawings also on display. Both artists play on contradictions, though, by employing gestures of motion and techniques to construct time. Their work is still, and the moment is frozen more than in flux. Like a museum display, there is little air and space is shrunk to claustrophobic proportions and time disappears almost completely, but our ability to examine a moment, or an emotion expressed as a moment, is exponentially increased.

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June 6, 2018 to March 3, 2019
Luce Center for American Art, 5th Floor
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, brooklynmuseum.org

Pools of shimmering silver, flies alighted on walls, golden snakes slithering through museum cases: Rob Wynne’s ethereal work makes a point of being impossible to pin down. His exhibition, Float, is placed as a critical counterpoint to objects on permanent display in the Brooklyn Museum’s fifth floorAmerican galleries. Wynne’s pieces interact well with their surroundings but would resonate on their own, thus making this a strong exhibition on many levels. The intellectual agility of the poured glass wall installations offers at times biting critique of the stodgy portraits and history paintings of the new American republic with their traditional European aspirations, but Wynne’s glass intrusions can by turns be tender and empathetic as well.

Wynne’s aesthetic embraces excess and is pervaded by prismatic, lustrous, and glittering qualities. But beyond any merely decorative bent, his work can plumb depths of his chosen material’s crystalline or chemical structure, hinting at infinite possibilities and interpretations. The purity of glass represents a physical and philosophical stubbornness that makes it both an overwhelming and reliable reference point.  This is particularly the case in the opening piece, Extra Life (2018), a swirling diaphanous galaxy of flickering globules that inhabits the back wall of the elevator lobby. Four white marble neoclassical mythological nymphs – lackluster to my eye – by American 19th-century sculptors masters Chauncey Bradley Ives, Randolph Rodgers,  and Frederick William MacMonnies are caught up in this abstract gesture of universality and motion—Wynne’s (in this case wordless) invocation to wake up seems to be heeded by the carved lasses, and the compositional interaction between the pure dull sheen of the white marble reacting with the silver of the mirrored particles on the wall and the room itself begins to move.

Wynne’s first decisive intervention in the collections is a small Snake (2011) inserted a case of Meso-American antiquities. That this diamond-patterned snake caught in a stylized slither is a wearable gold brooch serves metaphorically to clasp the before and after of American civilization playfully associates the mythological origins and similarities of all culturespre-Columbian and European invader alike. Wynne’s simple gesture is a nuanced commentary on the collection. Recognizing that a seemingly academic museum case full of ceramic in figures and bowls also has the potential for drama and narrative, Wynne’s snake determinedly undulates in one direction right at the back heel of a clay Ecuadorian jaguar vessel, approximately 1400-1700 years its senior, cheekily marching opposite direction,

All of the rest of Wynne’s intrusions, save one, consist of assemblages of lugubrious flat mirrored shapes applied to the walls, many of them passages of text. These are located near sculptures, paintings and objects of furniture which engage the text, either by a reference to the work itself, it’s subject, or a salient characteristic. In I Saw Myself See Myself (2018) a double-sided statement in mirrored glass which plays on Beatrice Wood’s “I Shock Myself,” Wynne presents a tautology which suggests the self-perception necessary in order to create an autobiography therefore acknowledges an inherent narcissism as well. The mirrored words float bluntly on the wall over a pithy 1934 Art Deco vanity and accompanying seat by Kem Weber, a furniture arrangement centering on self-observation and self-beautification completes Wynne’s thought process. On the other side of this room, the cast aluminum larger-than-life Fly (2008) plays the part of gossip, the nemesis of the previously mentioned idea of autobiography. Captured in the halo of a bright spotlight, the literal fly-on-the-wall gazes down on William Glackens’ erotically charged Girl with Apple (1909-1910) and John Sloane’s painting The Haymarket (1907). Sloane scandalously depicts  unaccompanied women entering a dance hall at the turn of the century.

Wynne’s fluid mirrored texts and occasional small sculptures are placed so as not to dominate the space, but that is what they often do metaphysically—I felt the presence of the artist was comparable to the whimsical and whispered voice of a wandering poet following me through the galleries. He would simultaneously bemoan the tropical heat in a Heade canvas and gush over a Bierstadt vista,   in Blaze (2018). At other moments Wynne was commiserating with a particularly uncomfortable Copley sitter in a stuffy costume in Translucent Threads of Dawn (2016). The objects of the gallery—the artifacts, paintings, sculpture, and furniture are reflected upon by the artist, literally and figuratively, and become a part of his, and our, stream of consciousness. Many of these connection between works are already there, but by adding in a line of text—a passage from a book, a line of poetry, or simply his own musing, he facilitates and strengthens these networks of meaning with his own chameleon-like texts and forms.

In the final room of the galleries, Wynne claims a well-deserved wall entirely for himself. In a room of contemporary canvasses, Wynne’s The Moon Viewers (2018) faces Alex Katz’s radiant yellow, Arthur 1 (2017). Wynne chooses exuberance as his exit motif,  using the the doorway out of the gallery as a major component of his piece. Deep blue melted glass forms cluster in the top left hand corner of the wall, tentatively beginning to trickle down from above.  The lower right hand corner of the wall displays a heartier eruption of silvery glass butterflies rises from the wainscoting to two-thirds up the height of the wall.  The dark rectangle of the door stands as a sharp-edged and geometric boundary between the two infusions. The Moon Viewers is both a rejection of the confines of canvas, frames and pedestals that dominate this and all the other galleries, and uses the gallery space as a canvas itself. The final piece is a cheerful finish to Wynne’s whirling start Extra Life,  which also took the floor, ceiling and walls on either side as its parameters. Though a text-less piece, The Moon Viewers still engages in the word play and symbolic meanings that the artist has used to circumscribe the art of these galleries. We are left wondering who Wynne’s Moon Viewers are, the butterflies looking at the moon, or the museum visitor reflected in their shimmering wings, or both?

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If Vasari were to update his “Lives of the Artists” for the 20th Century, Marta Jungwirth and Günter Brus would serve well as the Janus faces of painterly abstraction in Vienna in the period 1945-2000. Both Jungwirth and Brus, born in 1940 and 1938, respectively, have some basic similarities. For all intents and purposes they missed the ravages of World War II and spent their formative years in Vienna. And, if we assess their actual paintings, both fall neatly into the parameters of an open and gestural abstract expressionism. It’s amazing how many paths can lead to a similar result, some of which can include a spell in prison for publicly masturbating while singing the Austrian national anthem while covered in feces (Brus). The exhibition “Unrest After the Storm,” at the Belvedere 21 (February 2 to August 12), is revelatory in its illustration of Brus’s brave, political, and rebellious practice up to the point where he brings brush to canvas, offering exhaustive but never dull documentation of his actions in the form of hundreds of sequential photographs and the brilliant films of Kurt Kren. The Jungwirth retrospective at the Albertina (March 2 to June 3), a relatively staid affair in keeping with this bourgeois painter’s life, presents for the first time a much-needed visual history of this artist’s work. Her politics were subtler, questioning gender in terms of subject matter and medium.

Jungwirth, on display at the oppressively aristocratic Albertina, weaves in and out of representational and abstract imagery, finding herself most comfortable on the cusp of recognizeability as in the series “Spittelauer Lände,” based on the topography of Vienna. While almost pure abstraction, they have a barely discernible, almost secret visual model. Over the past 40 years Jungwirth shows a remarkable consistency of gesture, and while her aesthetic is that of brief markings, short slashes, and almost text-like gestures, reminiscent of Cy Twombly and early Philip Guston, her primary abstract concern is the density of her marks. This seems related both to her devotion to paper as a substrate (with gouache and oil), a medium that responds keenly by crinkling and undulating under whatever color media is applied, and her fixation on real world subjects: portraits, objects, and locations. Her pencil on trace paper dissection of the contours of a washing machine, Indesit (1975), is an ironic, but very serious, diagrammatic consideration of a “female subject.” These graphite edges, curves and stray marks have the same purposeful execution as her brush strokes in her later massive works on paper such as Here and Now and Never Again III (1982-83). These strokes, marks and blots gain heft and body in her work, often becoming fraught throbbing maelstroms of color. An untitled work from 2014, from the series Female Regents of the Old Men’s Almhouse, Frans Hals 1664, focuses this energy onto an arresting reinterpretation of Hals’s witty group portrait, forcing, or allowing, the old master’s five proper ladies to stand up and jostle, or even dance.

Brus’s paintings only comprise one sixth of the entire retrospective at Belvedere 21. This contemporary art museum, housed in a glass and steel pavilion designed in 1958 by Karl Schwanzer, stands in stark contrast to the patrician surroundings of Jungwirth’s exhibition. Brus’s career in performance is bookended between the early paintings and the later graphic works called Bild-dichtungen. These latter are extensive and colorful text-and-image works incorporating poetry and found verbiage (handwritten or printed) and illustrated by doodles and diagrams as well as meticulously rendered drawings. Dating from 1960, when Brus first came into contact with American Abstract Expressionism via the artist Joan Merritt, the three large, strong, black and white untitled abstractions from 1960, 1961 and 1963, respectively, seek to contain the artist’s frenetic energy. Like Jungwirth, Brus worked on the floor and on paper. Unlike his Viennese contemporary, however, he chose to deal only in absolutes color-wise, and this choice continues into his performance period as well. In the films “Ana” (1964), “Aktion Brus” (1965), and “Wiener Spaziergang” (1965), white paint expands from the proscribed painting surfaces to cover the artist and the space and individuals he lived with, also mimicked by his penchant for rejecting social mores. These films and their attendant photo-documentation are still inspiring now, and one of Brus’s great contributions is the diversity and spectrum of material he has manufactured over his lifetime, redefining the parameters of what is art.

For Brus, there is a notable retreat into a largely graphic and illustrative practice that may have been a necessary de-escalation after burning out from his intense performances of the ‘60s. The Bild-dichtungen seem a bit lost; derivative of Ensor, Schinckel, popular advertising, and a combination of Freudian and Jungian psycho-analytic imagery. Conversely, Jungwirth’s most recent works are as fresh as anything she has ever created. Standing between these veterans of the fertile painting scene of post-war Vienna, Brus appears to accept painting, and indeed any static medium as a necessary evil, while Jungwirth has instead blended herself entirely into the picture.

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WILLIAM CORWIN: The Aesthetics of Matter is the curated section of Volta. Mickalene and RC , you have zeroed in on the idea of collage, as well as the model of the artist’s collective as a vehicle for change. What historical models are you looking at?

RACQUEL CHEVREMONT: The Dadaists. Political turmoil really brought that movement together and a lot of the work was based around collage. Given the times we’re living in with the current political situation, especially as it relates to people of color; we felt that was a good model to follow.

Do you have any favorites of the Dadaist group?

RC: Hannah Höch.

MICKALENE THOMAS: I think of them as a collective and I don’t necessarily work out of them: it just makes sense to find an historical thread of how one would work when it comes to our political and social endeavors.

You’ve talked about collage as a political vehicle, can you give me your own definition?

MT: It’s making sense of all these things that are in your everyday life, in the sense of using this information—how does one decipher and use this information practically? To make sense of that, you take all of the components and you make it into your own. When you do this you are sourcing very various aspects of society: cultural, metaphorical and spiritual, and combining them in a pastiche; putting them together, which is collage.

For me, that’s what’s happening right now. As an artist in 2018, what type of art is one to make when you have a history of genres? Which genre would you pull from? If you look at a lot of painters today, they’re pulling from various genres trying to find their own voice—they’re trying to authenticate their own language.

RC: The #Metoo movement, Black Lives Matter, and then the political environment as it is, we needed to figure out how to make sense of all this information coming in. That was the other impetus for collage.

And the influx of technology?

RC: Social media, all of it, there are so many things going on that artists are having to deal with; collage is just what you naturally go toward.

MT: It’s a metaphor, something you can’t and shouldn’t always define, but you know it when you see it. For example, Devin Morris: when you look at his work, you would not immediately think of collage; but how he puts together the images, the sets, the space, and the performativity of the work. What’s executed is a photograph, but everything that went into making that photograph is collage.

How did you two co-curate? What was your process?

MT: It was natural: she would bring an artist to the table, I would bring an artist to the table, and immediately [snaps]. As soon as Racquel presented me with the work it was a must, and likewise [with my selections], and some of them we came to together. Naturally, we’re two women here, so I think out of the gate most people would think we’re going to have all women artists, and we would love to do that, but we wanted the work to be conceptually about groups of people, regardless of their gender and background, so you’ll see a really beautiful balance.

RC: There’s an MFA from Yale, then you’ll have someone who hasn’t even gotten a BFA.

MT: Some that are represented at galleries and some that don’t have any representation. There’s a dialogue with all of the work.

RC: It probably isn’t all that well known; we’re starting something called the Deux Femmes Noires. It’s an initiative to help bring exposure, and use our platform and visibility, for artists of color, in particular women. We all know, as a female artist, it’s extremely difficult to get funding for museum shows—a lot of museums don’t show women because of that—and then add to that being an artist of color, and then your odds go up even more dramatically.

MT: There’s a misconception that these funds are available, and then when you get to the door, you realize they are available, just not for you.

RC: We’re trying to bridge a little bit of that gap. We can’t do it all, but we’ve gotten to a point in our careers where we want to give back. We’re starting it off with this show at Volta.

Switching to the exhibition “Figuring History” at the Seattle Art Museum; it’s very rare to have the artist and the muse at the same table. I want to investigate that relationship. Several images of you, RC , are in the show, so I think it’s very a propos that we discuss this. How do you work together as the artist and the subject, what is that relationship like?

MT: It’s fantastic. It’s magical.

RC: I don’t actually feel like a subject, I feel like it’s a collaboration and we’re working together on it, so it’s wonderful.

You’ve been a subject many times before, Racquel, so you’re used to this in a way, being the inspiration.

MT: There was a lot of apprehension on my part to make and show some of her images. It’s for my own selfish needs, you know, not wanting anyone else to have any other images of her but me. A lot of these works come from previous bodies of work such as photographs and collages that I made three years ago, but I just had the creative space and the emotional space to gift them now. It is a gift from me to make a work of art of my partner, the person I’m in love with, the person who I’m growing with on all these different levels of partnership.

Do you feel like you’re giving part of that away?

MT: I was, but now I think it’s a great gift, because I’m showing the world what I feel and my connection to this muse, if you will. It was a lot of apprehension and resistance to present those, I was holding onto them for a long time.

Racquel, do you feel this apprehension, almost jealousy, in sharing this as well?

RC: I wish we could own all of them, but I do love that they’re going out there into the world. I am, we both are, very protective of them and where they end up, if they end up somewhere other than in our home. A part of it initially was she was nervous to paint me.

Were you nervous to be painted?

RC: I wasn’t because I love her work.

MT: I wake up with her, I was on eggshells: what if I paint her and she hates it? Or, the depiction is wrong, or something is awkward and she can’t stand it? All of that anxiety is around someone you love, you want to put them on this high pedestal. You want them to see it, and when they look at it, it speaks; it resonates; it glows.

What if she doesn’t like the image? Has that ever happened?

Both: No!

Mickalene, you’ve said that when you entered art school, you entered an abstract painter and you left a figurative painter. What caused that transition? What instilled that new found idea of the power of the image?

MT: Photography.

RC: I’m going to sneak in—I’m not sure she considers herself a figurative painter…

MT: Yeah, the use of figuration: image-maker, or one who uses representation. When I think of figurative painting I think of Eric Fischl and all those painters. I don’t necessarily look at the figure in the same way. There’s a different way of looking at, and seeing, the body that interests those particular practices that doesn’t necessarily interest me. But, I respect them. There is an element, a thread of that which comes into the work, but it stops at a certain point and I put it on the shelf because it’s about representation and the subject. What the subject embodies to me is most important: how I come into that is through photography. Using photography as a reference tool to make a painting was an avenue to how I approached using representation. I was making these crazy abstract paintings and I enjoyed making them. I received a pre-requisite letter in my mailbox as everyone does after their first semester at Yale that recommended that I take a photo class. I took that photo class and it changed everything.

I would never have thought that photography would be this huge facet of my work, every aspect from the collage to the installation to the painting is about photography, and I never imagined I would work out of that as a language. Thinking about materiality, concepts, and how I execute my work has lead into video and film. Though there are various disciplines I use in my work, there’s still that underlying thread that connects, and…that…is…collage [laughs]

Racquel, what is the motivating factor behind your practice as an advisor and a collector?

RC: I work within a narrow spectrum in the art world. I essentially collect African American, diaspora, and latino work. I began advising because there weren’t a lot of people that looked like me that were collecting. There are a lot of people that look like me who had the means, but didn’t have the interest. I thought it was really more that they didn’t have the [art] education and they weren’t told this was something you did. I began doing these salons in my home in Brooklyn where I would invite young people to come and listen to artists, curators, and other collectors speak.

While I was modeling I was travelling a lot. I wasn’t a party girl, so I wasn’t at night clubs. First off, I was reading investment magazines, and about art. I would go to every museum in every city I could—I was in Europe for a long time. The first few pieces I purchased were French artists, but then I got back to the U.S., to New York and really focused. I said “I’m going to build a collection: what do I want it to be when I’m no longer here, what do I want it to represent?” Mickalene was one of my early purchases; Laila Ali, Kehinde Wiley.

My passion is to make sure that people who look like us have a part in this history, and I felt they weren’t even being excluded, for the most part; because they weren’t even attempting to get involved.

The Aesthetics of Matter features Christie Neptune, David Shrobe, Devin Morris, Didier Williams, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Tomashi Jackson, Kennedy Yanko, Troy Michie. Figuring History also includes the artists Kerry James Marshall and Robert Colescott

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April 9 to December 3, 2017
The Pinault Collection
Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Venice

“Yes” is hard to find. At times it requires one clamber up a ladder and look through a magnifying glass at a teeny-tiny printed word; as in Yoko Ono’s Ceiling Painting (Yes Painting) (1966). In Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable Damien Hirst fabricates an elaborate and absurd mythology that leads us back two hazy millennia, to the bottom of the sea and up to the top again, in order to find Yes: an ultimately exalted demesne of the human spirit populated by unicorns, lions, bears, Mickey, Goofy, attractive naked people, the entire history of art, plus colossal demons and other fearsome horrors for good measure. Hirst’s quest has two parts: as he picks and chooses his mythological and archeological all-star team he underscores again and again that all of this is found and his for the taking. This is explicit in the narrative of the expedition to find the works, as well as the accreted coral, barnacles and shells which have “grown” over the works, signifying their ultimate decontextualization from the world of human culture. The artist is collector and adventurer, but not necessarily the creator, more the fabricator-in-chief. Hirst has always embraced the found object as source of inspiration, and he has always been willing to go out on a limb to push the boundaries of what found means, from the mortal remains of sharks, butterflies, cows sheep and pigs, to the pills in your medicine cabinet and realms to which they can take you. In this massive Venetian undertaking, the artist pillages art history via pages ripped from H.W. Hanson.

Frank Zappa recorded an album called “Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar” (1981) in which he restrained his juvenile sense of humor that was expressed through his lyrics, and simply played his instrument—to great effect. The seriousness of Hirst’s enterprise in “The Unbelievable” is tripped up by similarly nerdy, teen-age boy silliness. Mostly this involves inserting himself into the exhibition, as in The Collector with a Friend, a full-size replica of the iconic Blaine Gibson piece “Partners” (1993) depicting Walt Disney holding hands with Mickey Mouse, in this case Hirst standing in for Walt. The other weak point is a previously unprovenanced “genre” of sculpture, purportedly Greek, which offers extremely accurate representations of mostly naked women: The Diver is a particularly porny depiction of a headless woman’s body. Hirst expends so much mileage convincing the viewer that he can play with the concept of aesthetic and historic styles, at least via costume and context, that these astylistic examples, clearly generated using body casting techniques or seeming to, lack the foreignness that comes with the idiosyncrasies of mannerism. It is this historical and national diversity that is the basis of the whole project. The initial videos of scuba divers retrieving the sculptures, followed by the galleries of coins, ingots, jewels and amphorae go a long way in reinforcing the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. Aten a faux-Egyptian sculpture in red marble using Rihanna as inspiration falls within the parameters of almost being Egyptian, and The Warrior and the Bear depicting a scimitar-wielding gamin in a bikini bottom astride a giant bear is so absurd as to constitute a new hybrid style of Anime-crossed-with-Dungeons-and-Dragons. Unfortunately, most of the other hyper-realistic pieces depicting solely human subjects without monsters or costumes are unconvincing.

Can a fatalistically cheery outlook on the history of human creativity be wrenched from an ultimately reductionist Duchamp-ian approach to that creativity? Hirst is counting on the fundamental sentimentality that exists at the root of most human mythology and spirituality to make possible his broad generalized anthropological connections. He is largely successful. He equates the Gods of Hinduism, Ancient Egypt and the Aztecs with Walt Disney, contemporary celebrities Rihanna and Yolandi Visser, and fantasy novel/sci-fi imagery. It may be insulting, but one gets the impression that while Hirst’s avoidance of Judeo-Islamic-Christian imagery might be aesthetic colonialism, it’s more likely bred of the opposite: he finds those familiar traditions far too played-out and boring in terms of visual culture. Western culture’s contribution is Disney and porn, not Jesus and Mary, and through the eyes of his collector/slave alter ego Cif Amotan II, he has assembled what he thinks are all the meaningful characters, tropes, situations and motives from the history of world art and culture.

Depending on where you start your voyage on Hirst’s magic swirling ship, and I would recommend the Palazzo Grassi followed by the Punta Della Dogana, you begin with a sixty-foot tall headless demon and end in a tower ringed by unicorn skulls. The inclusion of curios as well as sculptures introduces another of Hirst’s favorite themes, the question of what constitutes a work of art. By pushing the momento mori/still-life to its absolute maximum in his works utilizing animal corpses in the past, Hirst forced a literal definition of the genre, removing all pretense and metaphor. In The Unbelievable, his frame is the museum itself, and his inclusion of reproduced natural objects such as Nautilus and giant clam shells, mineral specimens, gorgon heads and mammoths skulls in this very wide purview confers a legitimacy on all the objects, real or imagined. It is a wonderful make-believe narrative of art similar to what one finds in other singular presentations of esoteric collections like Sir John Soane’s Museum in London.

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May 5 to September 1 (extended), 2017
522 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, gagosian.com

Within the high walls of a cloistered garden, a young man falls in love with a rose, but seeking every possible avenue through which to attain his affection, it becomes increasingly clear he can never have it without destroying that aspect of it which he loves. With the general plot line of the original “Romance of the Rose” (1230 CE) in our minds, and its universal ramifications for all human relationships, we can follow the path that Anselm Kiefer weaves in his newest exhibition, “Transition from Cool to Warm,” rich with themes of sexuality, eroticism, femininity and longing. Though bookended with several massive paintings, the heart of the exhibition comprises watercolors and books. The exhibition has also been, to extend the metaphor, bookmarked by two events: an interview with Paul Holdengräber at The New York Public Library and an intimate demonstration of the plaster-soaked-cardboard books taken out of their vitrines at the gallery. These extra-curricular activities allowed the viewer into Kiefer’s thorny garden, and explicated a profound transition of the artist/author from his pulpit of philosopher and historian to a much more earthy place, looking up at the stars with the rest of us.

The exhibition has been laid out along the plan of a basilica, with a pair of rooms as aisles on either side of a main nave. The inner sanctum of the gallery contains a presentation of Kiefer’s newest one-off art books—hybrid objects that ensnare a dizzying number of references: to Wagner and Nordic mythology, Abrahamic traditions, Rodin, Picasso and the modern conception of data storage and presentation. On the evening of June 22nd, several of the books were removed from their vitrines and presented up-close. Vitrines have always served Kiefer well, and the chunky archaic tomes were accessible to the viewer as splayed hydra-like assemblages within their glass cases. Out of the cases though, and with their heavy encrusted leaves turned by two preparators, the static objects became storytellers. When reading, flipping a page is usually not such a big deal, though the term “page-turner” does still resonate; but when presented with Kiefer’s oversize monolithic works, the viewer is forced to digest the imagery of the page; a marbleized background overlaid with a languorous female figure traced in fragile graphite lines and then fluidly enlivened with watercolor in pink, beige, ochre, or any iteration of a flesh tone imaginable. With each turn the manuscript groans and the balance of weight shifts as one image recedes into shadow and another goddess or nymph appears. The majority of the books cover the subject of “Klingsor’s Garden,” 33 volumes in all, referencing the garden of women/flowers who attempt to seduce the hero in Wagner’s opera Parsifal. In contrast to the mythological is the historical “Jules Michelet: les Reines de France” (2013). Particularly edifying was the presentation of Keifer’s original sketchbook, “Erotik im Fernen Osten oder Transition from Cool to Warm” from the mid-1970’s. This fragile and deeply personal narrative placed the artist’s newest pieces in context. The female imagery has existed in Kiefer’s cosmology as a hot, diaphanous and perhaps uncomfortable balance to the epic literature and historical landscapes that have comprised his main corpus.

The day before the opening of the exhibition Kiefer was interviewed at the New York Public Library. Kiefer’s interlocutor, Paul Holdengräber, was able to expertly unpack much of the symbolism that forms a sturdy foundation for the current work. The discussion focused on the immediacy of the work in the life of the artist: Kiefer was brought up in a house in ruins, as it was bombed on the night his mother rushed to the hospital to give birth to him (or so the story goes), so the destructive propensities of history and the devastation in his work is from direct observation and experience. This was heightened in the discussion by Holdengräber’s bold decision to frankly address Kiefer’s “Occupations” series, the artist’s powerful and equivocal assessment of the war. On the humorous side, a slide of the artist dressed as a Cardinal underlined the fact that as a youth he longed to enter the Catholic Church and rise up the ranks of sacred hierarchy but was thwarted by the blunt assertion that no German could be pope. These revelations of juicy subtexts aid immeasurably in the understanding of the work, and even hint at the angle at which Kiefer approaches the erotic.

Unlike Picasso, the sexual imagery of whose late work emerges from his own lascivious fantasies, Kiefer’s vision is predicated on the works of his poet friend Jean-Noël Vuarnet, whose “Extases Féminines” (Paris, 1980) described the experiences of such personages as Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena. (Kiefer’s series of watercolors inspired by Vuarnet is on view.) Kiefer immediately builds a religious and numinous subtext into his eroticism, much as Wagner does with his field of seductive flower girls crossed with Christian iconography in Parsifal, and this accounts for the flowers as well as the Christian symbolism mixed together in the watercolors. The paintings which serve as something of a preface and epilogue to the main, bookish, body of the exhibition also engage the darker side of Kiefer’s Catholicism: Ohne title (untitled) 2017 and Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love) (2017) prominently feature lead torturously peeling off the surface of the canvas, an aesthetic choice that the artist in his Public Library discussion paralleled to the flaying of St. Bartholomew, while Schlange (snake) (2017) is a large vertical canvas crowned with a re-bar grate, a recreation of a grill on which to roast any number of saintly individuals. While that is decidedly hot, the oscillation between cool and warm is very perceptible in the artist’s handling of intense human emotions such as faith, lust, love and loss. Rather than cast himself into the flames, he prefers to ponder such issues within the walled garden he has built out of plaster volumes.

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Proclaiming, gesticulating, cajoling and even flailing, poet Pamela Sneed chanted a litany of fear, strength and tragedy, but ultimately admonished the cheering crowd to act with the words “Always Uprising.” The J20 event at the Whitney Museum, organized by Occupy Museums and Megan Heuer, Director of Public Programs and Public Engagement at the museum, offered a passionate alternative to the morbid events taking place simultaneously on the steps of the capitol on what Noah Fisher of Occupy Museums referred repeatedly to as “this Horrible day.” On a gray morning with intermittent showers, the Whitney became a wide umbrella shielding a vibrant and motley crew of cultural actors and activists in what is becoming an ever widening definition of art and artistic practice including environmentalists, low-income housing activists and community organizers, and advocates for the differently-abled who stood for a few minutes each to speak to the standing-room only crowd in the Hess Family Theater. Some plans were laid, narratives of both betrayal and progress were related, and a forward momentum and the groundwork for action through artistic channels were laid in amorphous but possibly practicable terms.

While the initial intent of J20 was a strike in which all museums would close in a nationwide demonstration of defiance against a bigoted, sexist and anti-intellectual administration taking power, the Whitney offered pay-what-you-wish entry and a venue for what could only really be called a group-therapy session to deal with a surreal transition in American and world politics. The speakers fell into roughly three categories, all co-mingled. The first were speakers who sought to verbalize the collective sense of anxiety and anger and by expressing it artfully, to expiate it and move the crowd briskly along the stops of denial, anger, bargaining, depression to acceptance (and then change). Pamela Sneed fell into this group with her plaintive and desperate petition to the crown not to allow this political set-back to reach catastrophic proportions, while Martha Rosler spoke of struggle to regain mental composure after being “just a little thunderstruck by an orange comet” and Aruna D’Souza plainly stated “everything we fear has already happened.”

A second varietal were activists who presented firm data, often describing successful collective action taken as well as cautionary anecdotes of failures precipitated by the status quo, which will become de rigeur in this new regime. Alicia Boyd of Movement to Protect the People described her ongoing battle to keep Crown Heights and the areas around Prospect Park accessible to low income Brooklynites and maintain a decent standard of living by requiring height restrictions on housing built around the park. She called out the Brooklyn Museum for its real estate entanglements and demanded that all museums be responsive to the need of local communities irrespective of median income. Kim Fraczek of the Sane Energy Project provided the most cringeworthy moment of the event, looking defiantly into the crowd and challenging the Whitney to divest itself of patronage from the fossil fuel industry. She explained the campaign she had participated in raising awareness of the dangerous natural gas pipeline running directly under the museum’s front steps which had been the target of local residents and activists alike. Their requests for dialogue had been flatly rejected by the museum administration. As she stood in the auditorium, listing the museum’s intransigencies, there was a satisfying sense of arrival, ironically caused by the Inauguration.

Avram Finkelstein and Dread Scott, who were among the planners of the event, characterized the third subset of speakers by suggesting ways forward. Scott immediately drew acclamation by walking to the front of the room carrying a poster with the words “BY READING THIS, YOU AGREE TO OVERTHROW DICTATORS”, implying there is no alternative at this point. Reminding those present that Nixon was re-elected by a landslide and still was removed from power within a year-and-a-half of that show of public support, he ended with “don’t wait until 2020.” Finkelstein talked about his own philosophy as a founding member of Silence=Death Collective and the artists’ collective Gran Fury: to avoid goals and instead pursue activism as a life-long occupation. This would prevent the normalization of dangerous, censorious, and exclusionary practices and generate a corps of activists always nimble and prepared to deal with the curve-balls tossed by an unpredictable despot. Leading the chorus of the group Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter who recited the names of police-murdered black women, Simone Lee made a simple but effective request of the crowd—simply start trusting black women.

Martha Rosler’s pronouncement “Thank you Whitney, fuck you Whitney,” were the final words, highlighting the contradictory nature of the presence of museum and artist in the context of activist politics. Many of the speakers decried the presence of patronage from wealthy individuals and corporations in the art world, a contradiction of philosophies for many artists that will be very difficult to change and has been the norm for the production of art objects for millennia. Laura Raicovich, President of the Queens Museum, and Carin Kuoni, Director of the Vera List Center, opening the program of speakers, pledged to support, promote and encourage the increased politicization of art, and the production of political art, but as with the entire political system, it is not the good intentions of galleries and curators in the art world that will effect any lasting change, it is the need to disseminate the ideas beyond the choir that was being preached to in a room on a rainy Friday afternoon at the Whitney Museum. A paradigm shift in the practices of artists and institutions away from capital will be the only way to generate truly collective art and promote a collective society, but even at this dreadful juncture in American history, after all the lessons of the 20th Century, is that what we want either?

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October 27 to December 17, 2016
510 West 26 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 399 2636

In a show of new sculpture at Alexander Gray, Siah Armajani has made the gallery a mortuary temple stocked with the tombs of two poets, one philosopher, and one martyr. The sculptural/architectural proposition of the tomb has traditionally encompassed both subversive and normative figures from Alexander to Oscar (the Great and Wilde, respectively), so his choice of Arthur Rimbaud, Frank O’Hara, Richard Rorty and Dietrich Bonhoeffer doesn’t stray from tradition. Still, the act of publicly commemorating cultural figures via intricate and monumental sculptural tombs certainly fell out of favor over the course of the 20th century, so Armajani’s pieces, invoking wit and anger with his crisp visual riddles rather than melancholy, is a welcome return to one of humanity’s more enduring tropes of visual culture. The artist’s process is on display in the exhibition as well, with preparatory drawings presented alongside the executed sculptures, but this decision posits much more of a quandary: while the two-dimensional renderings of the monuments are arresting in their sharp orthogonal perspective, their inclusion, as well as that of maquettes for the larger works, primarily serves to double the number of objects in the show and display a variety of scale that is largely irrelevant. In an architecture exhibition, drawings and maquettes are included because the final product isn’t. Armajani is not an architect, he is a revolutionary in terms of the direct connection between politics, life and art which he insistently draws in his work, and the inclusion of these Lilliputian doppelgangers only serves to create a false sense of the magisterial controlling master plans that are the bane of most monumental architectural projects. Armajani’s sculptures, despite their aspirations to the eternal and their sleek signature aesthetic, are humble, deeply heartfelt and personal.

Do the tombs evoke the individuals they represent, or are the titles more of a playful allusion to the artist’s own intellectual meanderings? It’s hard to tell: Armajani expects a lot of his viewers in terms of background knowledge.Tomb for Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2016), a sleek vermillion coffin on black sawhorses, clearly evokes the courageous minister, fitted with a noose, which was the instrument of his martyrdom at the hands of the National Socialists. The tombs of Rorty, Ribaud and O’Hara are not quite as explicit. Tomb for Frank O’Hara (2016) is a jolly affair and a much looser interpretation of the tomb — five disembodied and legless chairs emerge from two tables implying a late-night drunken conversation. The presence of a dark casket arbitrarily placed on the white tables pulls the whole assemblage back to the funereal; but this surreal centerpiece serves to heighten the absurdity, again directing the mind towards a besotted Irish wake rather than an eternal resting place. Tomb for Arthur Rimbaud (2016) also is a play on furniture-as-sculpture, lifting the everyday to the monumental. The “punch line” or pivot around which the piece moves is a pink and baby blue ramp or distorted table, perhaps alluding to Rimbaud’s youth and melancholy nostalgia, as well as his overall surrealism — in this tomb there is no box for a corpse.

The philosopher’s tomb, Tomb for Richard Rorty (2016), is the most architectural, and by that token the least sculptural; a large beige box stands atop a scaffold, like a fisherman’s hut on a pier, while the end of an umber coffin emerges from a rectangular orifice in the side. Both the coffin and its housing are not completely opaque: there are sizeable chinks between the wooden slats allowing for a visual permeability that negates the monolithic quality of the massing. How this is related to the father of neopragmatism is anyone’s guess though. It does seem a very pleasant dwelling place for the hereafter.

Written Iran (2015-16) and 100 and 1 Dead Poets (2016) utilize text in much the same ironic way that the artist repurposes furniture (and, to a subtler extent, architecture). In both cases, Armajani uses words to construct a fabric: in the former, text becomes an urban expanse, and, in the latter, an abstract pattern punctuated by a few small drawn objects referring to the text. As with the tombs, text becomes the jumping-off point of visual experience, and what the words actually say is sometimes less important that what they symbolize or the individual who wrote them. Written Iran brilliantly hops back and forth between the proposition that the city is a regulating geometry and presentational structure for the writing versus the words supplying the building blocks of the city. Armajani’s bridges and towers, recurring images for the Iranian-born artist, function much in the same way — their obvious but limited practicality only serve to highlight their metaphysical and textual meaning as beacons and links between people. In his sculpture, Armajani emphasizes a clear but limited color palette — and one that seeks to visually delineate the different parts of the construction — rejecting the idea of unifying the form through a sameness of medium but instead outlining a narrative by distinguishing the multiple parts and aspects of the piece. This brings a depth of vibrancy, warmth and humor to a dauntingly titled series.

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September 19 to October 24, 2015
287 Spring Street (between Hudson and Varick streets)
New York, 646 345 9831

At the center of “Alula in Blue,” Tamar Ettun’s exhibition at Fridman gallery, wedged between the two columns, is a giant ballast. Tied in place with chords and kept inflated by a perpetually blowing fan, the piece Blue Bubble (all works 2015) resembles a stomach or a lung, made from a parachute. Perhaps it was the combination of bright colors, glossy and glistening plastics and the profusion of body parts strewn throughout the gallery, but Ettun’s solo show left me feeling as if I had been dropped into an encompassing and deconstructed version of the always eagerly anticipated childhood game of Operation^®. Dispersed throughout the gallery is a working body that breathes and masticates, touches and digests. Orbiting around the inflated-parachute piece are wall-hung sculptures and free-standing totems, with a pair of vignettes in both window spaces. The entire show was constructed on-site from Ettun’s magician’s bag of components. While it was a living breathing body, it is also a handbook for interacting with “foreign objects.”

As with all contemporary user’s guides, a DVD is also included: A Mauve Bird with Yellow Teeth Red Feathers Green Feet and a Rose Belly, is a 13-minute performance created during a Watermill Center residency this past winter. Ettun’s dance ensemble, The Moving Company, features seven dancers in shimmering stretchy blue dresses, performing outdoors. Moving and accommodating each other, and they manipulate other objects as well — oversize balloons, large swaths of fabric and bushels of tomatoes. The video is the first of four to be created at the center.

In Ettun’s dance pieces, as in her sculpture, negotiating objects and other bodies is a means of reflecting and incorporating the environment into the self. Her sculptures are cast from her own or other’s bodies, and these writhing polychrome plaster replicas — mostly of hands, but also mouths/faces, backs/buttocks and breasts — perform for us solo, or with partners drawn from a joyous and intriguing array of “inanimate” partners. Woman with Tina’s Hip resembles a classical herm: a hatter’s dummy head is perched atop a blue cardboard cylinder, itself placed on a base made from a re-purposed speaker. What adds the dash of ribald sexuality that marks the herm trope is a draped thin plaster cast of Tina’s back and buttock — giving the perpendicular piece a gesture and movement, and wit. Woman with Tina’s Hip utilizes many alternate visions of the body as sculpture: there are the armless, legless and headless trunks of classical antiquity, the vast and trunkless legs of Egypt, but also the subversively beautiful thalidomide models of Marc Quinn.

The 10 singular hand sculptures and the larger ensemble piece, Parade, are inspired in part by Yvonne Rainer’s tantalizing 1966 piece Hand Movie. While many of these table-top-sized cast pieces are about handling objects (fabric, balls, paintbrushes, bananas), most of them, like Rainer’s film, are about moving one’s own hand and the wonder in the almost sign-language significance contained in each gesture. Fittingly, many of the objects are incorporated into the fingers themselves, as in Hand with Funnels and Hand with Kebab. Not all of these attachments look like they feel so pleasant, and this forced connection of body with object adds to the immediacy of the gesture, Hand with Twisted Fingers and Hand with a Brush positions the fingers behind the knuckles in a show of double-jointed acrobatics that imbues the sculpture with an unpleasant potential energy. Boob with a Nail is a small wall sculpture that tips an erect nipple with a dangerously protruding barb — a symbol of menacing femininity as much as a playful S&M aesthetics.

The act of caressing or holding or positioning a small object is the poetic heart of the work. These seemingly little sculptures, though they are life size, take on an intentionality all their own and very affectingly and sweetly elevate the simplest acts — of standing tall, or holding a flower or brush, or holding each other. The two robin-egg-blue hands lifting a banana in Two Gloves with a Banana look like workmen moving a sofa onto a truck by virtue of their scale! This tenderness is also manifested in Blue Bubble, which within Ettun’s physiological glossary could be the aforementioned stomach, lung or skin, but by virtue of the fact that it is meant to be entered and sat inside, it serves as a cool blue refuge from the frenetic activity of all the appendages outside. Inside the bubble, with the two columns framing the round form on either side, like a pair of hips, it is a quiet womb-like space where one can meditate on big things that seem small on first glance.

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May 28 to Jul 18, 2015
526 West 26th Street, Suite 211 (between 11th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 462 4406

The woven, the embossed, the embedded and the laminated: upon viewing “Paper Route 66,” one felt a bit like Carl Linnaeus trying to develop a taxonomy for works on paper in the year 2015. The summer group show at BravinLee Programs featured six sub-curated spaces of artists from around America: Houston, Pittsburgh, Miami, Detroit, New Orleans and Baltimore. While the show was too small and neat to allow for the consideration of larger questions like “Is regionalism dead in the Internet age” or “Is there a new American style?” the 20 artists and 26 works did present the confusing array of methodologies and processes that continue to complicate the increasingly non-literal categorization “work on paper.” It also gave a pleasant taste of each curator’s/curatorial group’s taste in choosing works.

Phillip Pyle’s Super Huey (2015) and Mark Ponder’s Jim Jones is Awesome (2015) presented a pair of portraits in Houston curator Paul Middendorf’s selection. Starting off the exhibition with these two heads — Huey’s in a bulbous cosmic helmet printed on glossy metallic paper while Jones a barely registered face receding into the space of the off-white paper — immediately gave the show a totemic mystical bent. This was bolstered by Devan Shimoyama’s Shadow (2014-15), a sparkling, glitter-covered pair of heads breathing rainbows and exuding galaxies, chosen by Amanda Donnan and Kim Beck from Pittsburgh. These were the only faces, but hero-worship was invoked by Spider Man and Gulls (2015) a six-part composition that posited an abstracted Spidey in the lower left-hand corner and played off that theme in a series of abstractions, by Stephen Booth and Jordan Bernier, chosen by curator Freddy, of Baltimore.

The work on paper inhabits a conflicted interstitial space; it lingers between finished piece and study, between experiment and pared-down iteration of larger works for which the artist is known. Corey Escoto, chosen by Pittsburgh’s Amanda Donnan and Kim Beck, contributed a delightful little muted geometric composition on Polaroid, Grid and Gob (2015), which resembled some sort of not-too-distant-future cocktail, a very nice evocation of his larger and more sublime sculptures and installations.

Next to Escoto in the Pittsburgh section was a quietly engrossing relief etching by Delanie Jenkins, Untitled (from the traces of absorption series) (2005-2006), a piece that plays on the ever-present patterns contained on the sheets of ultra-absorbent paper-towels, but shifts the designs into an off-kilter gear that results in a disquieting hallucinogenic sensation. Also capitalizing on the manipulation of texture are two prints from the Object Print Collection (I, IV, 2014) by Jessie Vogel, chosen by Amy Mackie of New Orleans, where the deep reliefs left by the collagraphy process imbue the paper with an almost object-like presence. Megan Heeres, chosen by Detroit curator Jennifer Junkermeier, reverses this process by embedding two circular thin metal chains (“found jewelry”) into handmade paper in A Certain Slant of Light (number 2) (2014). The foreign matter is not only described by its color and how it bulges through the tissue, but in the oxidation process initiated by the paper-making process itself: brown rust blooms form around the metallic elements. Slam Dunk, Madras, and Port (all 2015) by Justin Long, chosen by Amanda Sanfilippo of Miami, brings the operation full circle by dispensing completely with paper and drawing implement and instead sews series of acute isosceles triangles into a variety of fabrics. The fragile lines of twine play off the solidity of the red in Port and the quirky plaid in Madras and remain very much drawings.

Of actual recognizable drawings, there are a few. Sanfilippo-chosen artist Cara Despain presents two drawings Shallow (2001) and Belvedere [Birdcage] (2009), with narrative architectural fantasies, meticulously drawn, and toned and dusty with graphite. Despain utilizes wallpaper patterns and rococo silhouettes to visually frame and impose a composition on her surreal images of houses and garden vistas. While invoking a traditionalist sensibility by calling on these archaic forms, there is a literalness in the use of the wallpaper patterning that is much more contemporary — a kind of hand-drawn texture mapping. Jennifer Odem’s Table Study (2015), chosen by Amy Mackie, depicts a pair of enigmatic blobs placed squarely on a 12-legged schizophrenic table in a sort of fairy tale/fable-like visual composition, with spidery pencil lines and films and skeins of gouache reinforcing the fact that this is definitely a drawing. Oddly enough. Odem also employs the mimicry of a wallpaper/textile pattern on one of her blobs, and similarly to Despain’s drawing, the texture has a presence which seems disembodied from the rest of the image: again like a collage or texture mapped image. This pattern mimicry in these carefully drafted images leaves one with the impression that perhaps Odem and Despain are yearning for, or a bit jealous of, the tools being enjoyed by the other artists in “Paper Route 66.”

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