October 12 – November 4, 2018
56 Bogart Street, between Harrison Place and Grattan Street
Brooklyn, studio10bogart.com

Note: Artist in conversation with Jonathan Santlofer, Friday, November 2, 7PM

Emptiness, nothingness, nullity, void. That the human mind can conceive of a nothing as a something is an extraordinary feat of intellectual abstraction. But to anyone who’s suffered the loss of a loved one the concept is neither extraordinary nor abstract: the absence that fills their lives is an ever-looming, visceral, and unrelenting presence. Like a gaping hole in the world that bears the contours of the lost person, the void of the bereaved is so real it can acquire a life of its own. In some cases it can live longer than the person replaced.

In Ode to A Void, Ron Baron delivers a deeply felt experience of human absence in a new installation of exquisite subtlety. Inside a darkened room lit only by four carefully calibrated spotlights, a large spiral path of particulate matter stretches quietly across the gallery floor. Placed rhythmically atop the sand-like substance, its speckled white surface glinting in bright discs of light, dozens of pairs of ceramic shoes circle inward toward the spiral’s center. Most of them matte white like the dust they sit on (bisque-fired, they’ve been left unfinished by a final pass through the kiln), the shoes’ interiors are painted a light-devouring black. Slip-cast from shoes Baron collected from thrift stores, each pair bears the imprint of the anonymous life once lived in it. Except when it doesn’t, as in one particularly moving instance where a pristine pair of children’s ice skates looks as if it was never worn. Threadbare slippers, work boots, ballet shoes and high heels stand alongside weathered cowboy boots, sneakers, men’s loafers and baby shoes. Like so many empty vessels that have outlived their purpose, the shoes march in a silent procession toward the vanishing point in the center. Hauntingly beautiful and rich in associative resonance, the piece eviscerates abstraction and lodges right in the bones.

If physical traces of those absent manifest in the shoes’ wear, less literal evocations of lives lived also pervade the installation. Strewn about the spiral path are bits of flowers and broken glass, perhaps the remnants of birthdays and graduations, weddings and funerals. But even more affectively provocative are Baron’s use of placement and the range of treatments he gives to the shoes. Occasionally, the tiny shoes of a child will be nestled inside an adult’s, or an adult pair will erupt vertically from the interior of a toddler’s. Each is meticulously crafted to its own emotional note. Some pairs are marred by a barrage of rusty nails. Others are bound by metal wire or riddled with holes. Still others, departing from the stark white that predominates, have been ornately painted and glazed with various finishes, their bright colors perhaps suggestive of lives just extinguished. Between the moments of tenderness and the undertow of anguish, the swirling form pulsates with the full spectrum of human emotion. Circling its exterior – its outermost arm forming a closed ring, we’re barred from entering – we become empathic onlookers of the whole human drama.

Gazing down across the spiral, its form suggestive of our galactic home, we’re led to consider our predicament in the universe. Bound inside time, acutely aware of our own smallness and finitude and yet feeling ourselves and those we love to be as large as the world, we live in eternal incongruity with our indifferent cosmos. And what will remain when there’s no one left to remember that the species that mattered so much to itself even existed?

The economy of means with which Baron is able to evoke such ultimate questions is remarkable. Indeed, his use of a metonymically implied personal to conjure the universal charges the work with the kind of condensed expression we expect of great poetry. In this, the “ode” in the show’s title seems particularly apt. For while the human mind may be able to grasp negation in the abstract, the reasoning faculty founders when it comes to its own. Perhaps it’s only with the language of poetry that we can think the unthinkable – and, if not exactly accept the unacceptable, dare to feel the flame in all its intensity before it goes out. For all the absence in Baron’s work, the heat is palpable.

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September 23 to November 5, 2017
92 Plymouth Street at Washington Street
Brooklyn (DUMBO), smackmellon.org

Ron Baron’s installation Beyond-Beyond is centered in Smack Mellon’s completely darkened main space, where nearly a hundred ghostly ceramic casts of shoes, boots and other footwear are delicately placed in small islands of light on the concrete floor. Facing forward in pairs or combinations, the ensemble suggests a vaporized march of refugees –– with overtones, resonating in the cavernous darkness, of both the Holocaust and the Rapture. On entering the space, the vibe is forbidding, but approaching closely one sees that each unglazed white sculpture is nuanced and inventive, even playful in a biting Surrealist way, as in weird meltings, slicings, piercings, and fetish-style nailings. At the same time, Baron’s finely expressive casting lends each leathery rumple and untied shoelace the quality of portraiture, so that a neatly sliced pair of loafers with baby shoes nestled inside becomes tenderly tragic.

In some cases the crucifixion-size nails pin shoes through, unambiguously evoking the Passion, which seems either heavy-handed or, given the Surrealist context, too glib, but the lack of tact is clearly intended. Certainly it distinguishes this work from the generally chilly use of casting in contemporary art, as with Christian Marclay’s 1990 Boneyard (to take an example currently on view, at Paula Cooper), in which hundreds of white Hydrocal clones of an old telephone receiver (the corded kind, but dis-corded), scatter across a gallery floor, perhaps evoking –– despite accidental couplings and menages –– the death of communication. Baron’s work is far from being dispassionate in this conceptual manner. Even aside from the nails, his investment of sculptural curiosity and skill in individual pieces raises the temperature –– which is, however, modulated overall by the spectral restraint and gravity of the installation, the uniqueness of each piece taking its place within a larger fate. The empty shoes, of course, imply the people imprinted in them, and Beyond-Beyond is eloquent about the pain of absence; that is, personally mournful and also universally elegiac about what might be the vanishing footprint of the entire family of man.

In the small gallery, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky’s film The Perilous Journey of María Rosa Palacios re-enacts the artist’s great-grandmother’s migration, at the age of 14 and mostly on foot, from the interior to the coast of Ecuador in 1906. The 30-minute video is paced meditatively, assembled from extended shots that give just the right amount of information and which unfold with a kind of grandeur that stays with you. Early on we see a close up of the artist’s hair, a living emblem of her Afro-Ecuadoran heritage, as it is painfully combed out and knotted into traditional braids. These she wears, along with traditional dress and gear, for the remainder of her journey on foot, mule, train and boat. An expository conversation with an elderly relative whom the artist had never met is compelling and bittersweet. A patient vista of a train winding around the flank of a mountain, distorted by the Andean distance, imparts the illusion of the train cars bending like a caterpillar. One long take involves an unseen man directing the artist as she walks up a stony village street. It declares, with cinematic deliberation, that we are not watching a documentary –– no matter how moving the personal story and fascinating the travelogue. A final handheld shot accompanies the artist as she arrives at the thriving fish market of her port city destination. It is impoverished by first world standards, but at the end of this compressed, somewhat cryptic epic, the place seems more civilized, the people more decent than in any city in America.

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October 1 to November 6, 2016
791 Bushwick Avenue at Dekalb Avenue
Brooklyn, info@theparlourbushwick.com

What a World, What a World is an exhibition of eight sculptors who use found materials—to some degree. It was curated by Luisa Caldwell, whose impressive curtains of found candy wrappers, exhibited at Long Island University last Spring, wove Aztec beach blankets with Klimt-like translucency from scraps of colored cellophane. That same riches-or-rags dichotomy is expressed in this show where half the works are elegant and refined, the other half crude and casual, and where all are experimental departures from the artists’ usual practice.

The Parlour’s parlor greets us with Donna Huanca’s Hooker Shoes, (2016) a pair of stilettos encased in nylon nets, fur, toy octopus bits and other flotsam presented on a pedestal. It might pass for a Bruce Connor assemblage were it uniformly brown, rather than motley –– and a far cry from the ambitiously cool, candy-colored aesthetic of Huanca’s installations involving painted living skin. On second thought, the angry rush of materials is nothing like Conner’s infinite care with the abject, and seems intended politically. If so, it’s a bit undercooked, considering that spiked heels right out of the box perform the body as an entanglement of sex, sexism, fashion, consumerism, race and class, and have been a staple of artistic speculation since the days of Meret Oppenheim.

On the mantle behind, Jane Benson’s vase of flowers is so subtle that it could be mistaken for brownstone decor were it not for a slab of thick yellow on a face of the glass, applied with an impasto that recalls Jonathan Lasker. Even then we might miss how the “hand-cut artificial flower” within has been plausibly returned to geometry. The artist has a second work in the pantry in which only green, money-shaped leaves remain. The gesture of these works is precise –– the hand redeems human synthesis of nature, but only by acting like a machine.

Jude Tallichet and Matt Freedman, a sculptor couple with independent sensibilities collaborating here, have furnished the parlor with a ghost upright piano made from thin wood stripping hastily screw-gunned into an exact-size bounding box. Two wiggling, rubbery casts of keyboards, yellow and purple, seem to want to express the idea of “jazzy,” as in a wall display behind the popcorn stand at the cineplex. Too tragically real in their deformity, however, they verge instead on “creepy.” A jazzman’s pork pie hat sits atop the schematic piano; it is sculpted from a papier mâché-like material with satisfyingly blunt impatience, as is a collection bucket on the floor. Disembodied pairs of lips with teeth overflow the bucket, the haul from a Surrealist rent party, perhaps, or a Gumby slaughterhouse.

If the obsessively reworked and damaged ceramic objects that Ron Baron recently exhibited at Valentine felt like exorcisms, The House Stripped Bare, Really (2016), his sectional, wall-mounted architectural scenario made from folded tin dollhouses and plastic figurines, returns to this artist’s usual sculptural clarity and emphatic punning. On the wall, the Eisenhower and Kennedy era dollhouses create a suburban cul-de-sac as seen from above. One house has its furniture outside, as if for a bankruptcy or alien abduction, while a crowd of stereotypes (cowboys, Jacks and Jills, soldiers, dogs, astronauts, babes) pours downward toward the unperturbed Bride, who faces them in her bell-shaped wedding gown. Baron (at least in this more familiar mode) is a perfectionist, not only as craftsman but – in his assemblage preferences – as collector. One house is softly colored like a Golden Book, another is as crisp as a Popular Mechanics diagram, and all cast shadows through the grids of their cut-out windows onto lushly printed metal interiors.

Swinging back to the anti-perfectionist end of the show, Root People, (2016) Anna Rosen’s compound of hanging plastic cylinders recycled from old planters, seems a far cry from the freshness and sophistication of her painting practice. The floral patterns she brushes onto the cylinders would get worked hard on canvas and transformed, but here they stop at their initial iteration. Crude clay figures can be spotted inside –– homunculi, perhaps, of creative fertility, which can’t take root in this bare, leftover plastic. (The rich loamy smell of potting soil might be just what the piece is missing.)

Harry Finkelstein’s jewelry-sized tableaus of small fragments of disparate kingdoms are arranged in several locations. A tiny knot of wood like a scholar’s rock, shattered windshield glass set like precious gems, and other curiosities straddle the line in these works between the fabulous and the arbitrary. One untitled work (2016) suggests a Fabergé egg, complete with an oval window. The view inside, however, is no more intricate than outside, a disappointment that may or may not be intended. 

And Caroline Cox’s lighter-than-air Whirl (2016) is an arrangement of crystal spheres and aqua blue monofilament on a pure white slab. Looking down, one is reminded of a drawing made by a super collider, with subatomic rarities etched in beautiful curls of decay –– except that the materials could have been bought on Canal Street for a few dollars instead of half a trillion; and instead of terawatts of energy, Cox needs only the magic of physical behavior: reflecting, magnifying, looping, and twisting. In conjunction with What a World, a visit to the superb group show Fish Tank, currently in LIU’s glass-enclosed Humanities Gallery and co-curated by this show’s Matt Freedman, is highly recommended, in part because Cox’s web-like installation there is a kind of three-dimensional, hanging version of Whirl’s acute graphic slice. On its white slab, poised above the floor on hidden glass spheres, Whirl is an epigrammatic snapshot of the artist’s taming of chance.

Cox co-ran a pioneer gallery in Williamsburg for many years called Flipside. Crucial parts of a healthy ecosystem, artist-run galleries and artist-curated shows are like Cox’s refracting, inter-connective webs. On the way out, you may notice some of Freedman’s extra porkpies on the period hat rack, reminding us of hats being passed around, of wearing different hats, and of getting to try things on.

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