November 3 to December 17, 2017
109 Ingraham Street, between Porter and Knickerbocker avenues
Brooklyn, silasvonmorisse.com

Frances Barth’s new paintings combine calm planes of beautiful color with graphic details that suggest landscape, while also subverting easy spatial readings. As with Thomas Nozkowski’s cryptic modes of abstraction, Barth’s uncertain terrain is precisely balanced between lucidity and mystery. An absorbing world of imagination might also be a quirky transcription of observable facts. With unerring color harmonics that are as sophisticated and seductive as those of any artist working today, Barth’s paintings are almost soothing despite their unsettled space.

References to landscape became explicit in Barth’s paintings of the 1980s, and since the late 1990s her work has achieved an absorbing collage-like interplay of geological diagram, topographical mapping, and flat, luminous space. In the triptych CG (2016), thought balloons and cutaways of what might be aquifers and subterranean drainages puncture assured, leisurely fields of carefully adjusted pinks and blacks, grays and blues. Another triptych, Olive (2017), is primarily green with inscribed curvy shapes that suggest golf course sand traps and artificial lakes––but with wraparound lines and misregistered contours that set them adrift.

Barth makes expert use of acrylic, keeping its plasticky luster in check. Her surfaces are generally matte and opaque, almost like tempera, but she also exploits acrylic’s brushy translucency for strategic contrast. In Yellow Yellow (2016), a spacious expanse in which a tipped up, kidney-shaped pool somehow floats in the air above a crater, two dry, grainy layers of gray reveal the yellow ground beneath like an inadequate coat of primer. The effect is mesmerizingly nonchalant, and suggests the cool shadow of an immense cloud passing across badlands. More intimate is Genie (2014), in which a mountain-like form placed in a white oval inset might just as well be a pie or a loaf of bread on a pan, a reading supported by the seeming occlusion of intermittent black lines by horizontal bands of liquid ochre in the background, as if a tree branch or a river were seen through Venetian blinds. Along the left edge a dry overlay of blue casts its shadow over mostly vertical ochre bands woven like loose matting. The ensemble has a porous, Bonnard-like interiority, but it could just as well be tectonic in scale.

Recently Barth has experimented with narrative, in book form and animation. In the video End of Day, End of Day (2007) (exhibited in her 2010 show at Sundaram Tagore) a twice-cycled sequence of line drawings, discerningly hand-drawn after photographs, it seems, of quotidian New Jersey streetscapes, combines obliquely with a married couples’ scripted dialogue. A more complex animation, Jonnie in the Lake (2016), currently showing at festivals, makes extensive use of digital landscapes in ways that are visually consistent with the methodology of her paintings. The latter work especially, as well as her graphic novel Ginger Smith and Billy Gee (2016), also digitally drawn, make explicit the topological hints in the paintings, with characters diving into holes and climbing through tableaux ––although neither of these narratives, which affect the innocent manner of children’s bedtime stories, nor the spaces within them, are conventionally “linear.”

In the current show, digital artifacts related to these bodies of work have made their way into some of the paintings as collage elements. A series of five works titled Com 1 through Com 5 (2011-12) is meant to be read sequentially, like an abstract comic. All of these panels include collaged digital fragments that are so consonant with Barth’s layered painting process that one may not notice them at first. By and large, the digital elements function as an integral painterly texture, although the uninflected thickness of the white digital line hovering at the bottom of Com 5 contrasts aggressively with Barth’s usual subtlety of touch. (But note that Barth’s hand-painted lines in general can be quite jittery, as if wrested from a digital mouse!) The larger disjunction with this group of paintings is in the insistent spatiality of certain non-digital incidents, such as a crayon-textured blue block floating in Naples yellow in Com 2, and a black-and-white geometric figure that casts a stark shadow on the ground in Com 1. If the probing of narrative genre in Barth’s nascent animations and graphic novel tend to dispel the profound visual mystery of the artist’s intuitions of space, the pressure of sequence on this group of five paintings, each of which is entirely coherent on its own terms, seems to have added something palpable to those intuitions.

With her new sequential work –– animations, book, and the Com paintings –– Barth brings into the open longstanding internal disputes that are the essence of her practice. The small panel Adobe Dream (2013), for example, is perhaps the most beautiful painting in the show, its saturated, luxurious color and just right, off-kilter geometry the result of an artist working at the top of her powers. The painting is seemingly effortless in its mastery, with nothing forced yet nothing lax. All the same, there is a fly in the ointment, which is an implicit argument between abstraction and narrative, between stillness and forward motion.

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October 3 to November 6, 2016
109 Ingraham Street (between Knickerbocker and Porter avenues)
Brooklyn, NY 646 331 2368

Piles of Amazon cartons sit in the center of Bushwick’s ART 3 Gallery. Salvaged from curbsides around the city, these boxes have been laser-cut with a variety of aphorisms sourced from Amazon’s ”fulfillment centers,” as their massive warehouses and shipping depots are euphemistically termed: “Your margin is my opportunity,” “Lift bend squat reach and move,” “Growth mindset.” Empty of goods but filled with meaning, these containers were shipped through the postal service to the gallery for Brett Wallace’s solo show, “If This, Then What.” Wallace’s work examines the relationship between digital and physical labor in a world where corporations like Amazon move physical goods around using algorithmic and human processes of command and control.

Amazon’s fulfillment centers, some of which can be larger than six football fields, are algorithmic beehives in which worker productivity is tightly controlled through digital surveillance and the quantification of labor. Each worker is expected to maintain a particular rate of productivity at whatever their task may be, and their performance is automatically monitored. According to Wallace, these centers have an annual turnover rate greater than 80 percent: only one in five employees lasts more than a year.

Some of Wallace’s works reference specific fulfillment centers: BS-i2-1.0_2016, a wall-mounted mixed-media assemblage, contains an Amazon fulfillment center-branded t-shirt and hat, each sealed behind Plexiglas in a little wooden reliquary. These are attached to a main panel emblazoned with a corporate logo that resembles Amazon’s but is in fact Amazing, a parody startup company founded by Wallace that appropriates the visual and corporate language of Amazon. Amazing ships around empty Amazon boxes inscribed with the company’s empty slogans. Against the gallery’s far wall is a wooden desk covered with more Amazing-branded materials such as rolls of black Amazing and pieces of thin cardboard. These are prints, each unique, that were created using a low-powered laser to engrave text and images into the cardboard without cutting through it.

The automated process of laser cutting, used on the boxes and the prints, has parallels to Amazon’s automated processes of employee surveillance and control. Two wall-mounted pieces were created using such methods and draw attention to the gap between ideal digital forms and imperfect material manifestations. These pieces were based on the maze from Pac-Man; its walls have been cut out of the wood or Plexiglas substrate. Intersected and disrupted by the maze’s negative space are colorful inkjet prints of integrated circuit layouts, the physical basis of digital computation. But even at a distance a viewer can see where the laser cutter burned the Plexiglas, or where the automated router bit cut out too much wood. These imperfections serve as a kind of material allegory for corporate contingency: the labyrinthine systems of command and control that power Amazon may seem perfect as digital abstractions, but the uncertainties of the material world, such as worker satisfaction, can interfere with the corporation’s virtual ideals.

Amazon began at the dawn of the Internet age as an online bookstore. After expanding to include other media products, like CDs and videos, its inventory exploded in size to encompass the material entirety of existence under late-capitalism. Its latest ventures, such as grocery delivery, streaming video, data centers, and potential expansion into drone-based package delivery (pending approval from the FAA) move the company closer to becoming a “mega-corporation” straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia. Behind the shiny digital veneer, however, is a workforce that toils unseen and unappreciated by Amazon’s customers. Wallace doesn’t necessarily give these workers human faces, but he does take Amazon’s objectification and quantification of the individual as a starting point, building a body of work that occupies the uncomfortable gap between lived experience and digital immateriality that these workers inhabit daily.

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