October 14 to November 13, 2016
56 Bogart Street (at Grattan)
Brooklyn, NY 718 852 4396

The six large paintings, all done this year, in Suzanne Joelson’s show at Studio 10 evince the ecstasy of first love. The paintings are notably suffused with crazy feeling, ranging from the erotic cropping of an image of eggs in carton, the sensuous rhyming of paint strokes and chicken skin, or the fierce splintering of a wood paneled surface. Known as an incredibly smart artist, voracious reader of complex theory, and an enthusiastic educator willing to consider all possibilities of making art, it seems that in this latest body of work she has thrown caution to the wind and followed her heart.

The trigger for this lust resulted from coming across discarded vinyl supermarket banners while on a jog with her husband. The possibilities inherent in the over-sized, groomed advertising images of grocery staples — eggs, kale, chicken — hit her like a lightning bolt. Sliced up, the banners were immediately employed as collage elements in her paintings. The results are startling, certainly due to the punch of their visual effects as paintings, but also because of the way the pieces of banners have inspired her to paint with a newly discovered sophistication that leaps beyond intellectual propriety.

All the rational formal decisions Joelson used to make are still there, but have become subordinated to the emotional impact the banner images bring. These collaged images have brought a delirious scale to Joelson’s work and every painted moment now occupies a dual identity as pure abstract paint as well as a reference to the fragments of large-scale depictions of food.

Massaging Kale, has a passage of striated green, black, and white paint in the middle panel of three that reads as a motion-blurred image of the vinyl vegetables depicted on the side panels. Joelson might have previously used a similar paint facture before, but the transformation of the paint into a representational analog is new here, and an elevation in understanding of the possibilities of the dual nature of paint itself as both material and signifier.

Joelson loves the play of language both visual and verbal, and Crack, Rake, Crate has both. Metaphorical transformations abound from painted green stripes, green and white striped cloth, and the green tines of an old rake that hangs Rauschenberg-style off the surface of the painting. The “old rake” may be a pun because it challenges the power of what seem to be large naked brown thighs. But those inviting thighs are just the cropped image of two giant eggs astride a pudendal gray triangle of egg carton. The fracturing of the painting by the alternating horizontal/vertical arrangement of four rectangular wood panels to produce an empty white square in the middle echoes the tongue-twisting title.

The eggs in crate/thighs in panties recur in Egg Game, (another punning title as a post-modern rebuke to the idea of endgame abstraction). But even when she becomes more abstract, as in the paintings, As It Happened and Where it Went, which introduces the show, and Grasping the Center, near the end, Joelson still produces an emotional impact. In As It Happened Joelson uses the ideas inherent in the wood panels of its construction, playing with the scale of the dark grey enlarged wood grain found on the vinyl banners, or shattering the surface to show the wooden structure underneath. The violent splintering contrasts with the rational construction of echoing shapes and negative spaces. While Grasping is composed entirely of sky blue vinyl fragments and white paint, the way the central white image is patched together from the fragments is almost Frankenstein-like.

F. Scott Fitzgerald defined first-rate intelligence as the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time and still be able to function. But contemporary painting contains so many conflicting ideas that trying to reconcile all of them can produce arid results. Joelson masters the impossible complexity of modern thought, not through rationality but through feeling.

The post Lusting for Kale: Suzanne Joelson in Bushwick appeared first on artcritical.

Few artists make work that both looks good and manages to make the world a better place, but Aubrey Roemer is one such artist. Her artistic career spans oceans and continents, from a strip club in Brooklyn to the sugarcane fields of Nicaragua, and from the islands of eastern Indonesia to the migrant camps of Greece. Everywhere she goes, she uses painting as a way to make genuine connections with people and foster awareness of social and environmental issues both locally and globally.

I first became acquainted with Roemer’s work in the spring of 2014 when she had just moved to Montauk to work on her “Leviathan” series, in which she attempted to paint 10 percent of the town population in the course of a summer. Painted in blue on domestic fabrics donated by the local community, the portraits were installed on the beach where they were free to flutter in the wind, their blue and white forms flickering between sea and sky. I’ve been consistently impressed since then by the way she builds rapport with her subjects and then installs her work with an aim of serving the community that inspired it. Her story illustrates how an artist can change the world, one painting at a time.

Though she’s been painting her whole life, Roemer’s practice of community engagement began in 2013 with the “Demimonde” exhibition at Pumps strip club in Brooklyn. She was invited by Pumps’ pinups director Laura McCarthy to do a solo show of paintings at the club, and the show was such a success that Roemer went on to curate three more exhibitions/burlesque nights there. The shows featured Roemer’s paintings of the dancers alongside work by Brooklyn-based artists such as the painter Jesse McCloskey, who has kept a studio around the corner from Pumps for the past 10 years. Roemer fostered collaboration between two communities that had hitherto coexisted side by side without interacting very much, and perhaps both groups discovered that they had more in common than they might have thought.

Hopping from residency to residency since then, her adventures have become increasingly fantastic and inspirational. With support from World Connect, Roemer traveled to Nicaragua in 2015 to do a project with La Isla Foundation, a non-governmental organization that fights the under-publicized epidemic of chronic kidney disease from unknown causes (CKDu), which is ravaging Central America and other equatorial regions around the globe. It is especially prevalent among agricultural laborers worked to death in hot climates—their kidneys fail, from overwork in extreme heat and possibly also as a result of the chemicals used in industrial monoculture. Because sugarcane is a major revenue stream for the national economy, La Isla Foundation gets far more pushback than support from the Nicaraguan government on the matter.

Roemer spent one month living in the Chichigalpa region, where she watched trucks full of sugarcane rumble past while painting portraits of deceased workers on discarded sugarcane sacks. She also painted protest banners, which have since been used by a local grassroots movement agitating for research on CKDu and compensation. As tensions heightened between La Isla Foundation and the government, she had to leave before the project was complete. Just last month Roemer returned to Nicaragua and displayed the completed works in the ruins of an abandoned church, and then gifted them to the community.

Her next project took her to Indonesia, where she set sail from the island of Lombok with a motley crew of artists on board a traditional wooden phinisi sailboat to explore the culture of the remote eastern islands. During this time Roemer completed another project, titled Maccini Sombala (“Seeing Sails”), in which she traced the hands of the people she met on the islands and printed them directly onto the sails of the boat. She used a range of greens that both reflected the lush environment of the islands and tipped a hat to the Islamic culture of Indonesia. This spring, Roemer will curate the next residency aboard the boat, called the Al Isra, proceeds from which will go towards the installation of a solar-powered trash collection wheel at the mouth of the nearby Mataram River, which it’s estimated will stop 10 tons of plastic from entering the Indian Ocean every day.

After returning to Long Island for the summer, Roemer and her boyfriend traveled to Greece to see how they could be of service to the flood of migrants washing up on the islands. Roemer embedded herself in a refugee shelter for migrant boys on the island of Lesvos. Titling the work Khamsa, she created 99 prayer flags using reclaimed fabric from deconstructed life preservers and emergency blankets. The “Khamsa” is a North African talisman of a hand with an eye in its palm, so she traced the hands of 66 women who she met there, and then added images of the women’s eyes to complete the works. The khamsas were also accompanied by 33 prayer flags upon which male migrants were invited to write prayers and protests. The number 99 was chosen to represent the number of beads on an Islamic prayer necklace, and the ratio of men to women was intended to counter the media narrative that portrays the migrant crisis as consisting primarily of men.

After traveling to China to exhibit Khamsa at 203 Gallery in Shanghai, Roemer followed the work back to Greece where it was installed at Athens’ IFAC Gallery, which gave Roemer an opportunity to show Yasamin, a girl she had met in a refugee camp and who had become her assistant for the project, their work installed in a professional setting (though only through Whatsapp, as Yasamin was still held in immigration custody on Lesvos). Reflecting on the project over Skype, Roemer told me “The most important form of contemporary art I could make, the most compelling thing I could possibly do, was to be standing by this young girl’s side and making art with her. It actually didn’t matter what it was at all, just the fact that I was standing next to her.” Proceeds from sales of the work go to Greek NGO Desmos, which is active on the frontlines of the refugee crisis.

In his 2006 book of collected essays, Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight, the poet and critic Alan Gilbert suggests that art can serve as a means of “imaginative resistance” to the systemic problems that plague our world, through “tactics imaginatively employed on a daily, local, and global basis (with the knowledge that when the effects of globalization reside everywhere, local activities have global ramifications and vice versa).” This is what Aubrey Roemer is doing with her painting practice, through which she not only publicizes relevant issues affecting marginalized communities, but also directly empowers and uplifts the members of those communities with whom she works. This is contemporary art at its finest.

The post Aubrey Roemer: Helping the World, Painting by Painting appeared first on artcritical.

June 3 to July 17, 2016
56 Bogart Street (between Harrison and Grattan streets)
Brooklyn, 212 967 9818

“A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.” –bell hooks

I went to see “With Passion,” the current group show on view at Slag Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, prepared to be absorbed in something other than headlines. The despairing news cycle had been unfolding that a male Stanford University student, recently convicted of raping an unconscious female behind a campus dumpster, had been spared his recommended prison sentence by the presiding judge. The white, former star athlete Brock Turner was instead sentenced to only six months in the county jail, a slap on the wrist for the degradation of a woman’s body.

Passion and compassion are twinned themes and philosophical conceits — emotions that, living in this strange and crestfallen moment, seem especially worthy of contemplation. The Latin root of both words is pati, meaning “to suffer,” which suggests that by choosing to plumb these emotions, we can better understand personal and collective grief, and use it in the service of activating meaningful change in the face of injustice. In “With Passion,” five international artists probe what it is to be ardent, how that fervor stimulates a response in viewers, and the ethics, on the part of the audience, of taking that response out into the world.

Six drawings by Erika Bagylas, selected from a larger series entitled Don’t Become a Statistic! (2013–2014) open the show. Bagylas hails from Hungary; existence during the nation’s three-decade, Soviet-supported Kádár era is often the subject of her interrogation. She refers to the extreme censorship experienced by Hungarians during the period as “social trauma as life situation.” Bagylas frequently incorporates performance into her practice, which is reflected even in the static works on view here. Some are theatrical, as in The Circus Belongs to Everyone (2014) where two figures walk on stilts and juggle, respectively. Others exhibit a more mournful quality. In The Supporters (2014), one woman rests her hand on the back of another, who in turn rests her hand on a larger figure, covered with a sheet like a ghost. Perpetrators (2014) depicts two bodies each standing on a box, facing each other and pointing their fingers at one another like guns in a chilling intimation of violence. In each drawing the human forms are drawn in delicate crosshatching on black paper with white ink, with an empty space where the body’s head should be. Those blank heads seem indicative of individuals from whom something primal has been stolen. Whether that comes at the hands of a totalitarian regime, or a lone perpetrator, the pain is evident and it transcends Hungary’s political history, resonating universally.

Some of the strongest works in the show are those that directly counteract suffering. Socially engaged artist Jody Wood’s video work In the Black Box (Looking Out) (2016) and its corresponding photographic series, Client Abstraction (2016), present here, are derived from a project she completed earlier this year. In Choreographing Care (2016), Wood ran a workshop where a theater troupe taught social and care workers to make use of warm up and cool down techniques actors use in preparation to play characters in agonizing situations. Workers in these therapeutic professions experience a high degree of “secondary trauma” as a result of the constant support they give to others enduring extreme circumstances. In the two-channel video, actors demonstrate these methods on one screen while on the second Dionisio Cruz and Jan Cohen-Cruz, a married couple who are a therapist and a drama professor respectively, discuss secondary trauma as it relates to each of their professions. Hearing them relay their personal experiences while simultaneously watching the actors demonstrate the exercises is stirring. One actress, lying supine, has her hair stroked by another while a third gently caresses her legs and feet with a soft cloth. The love and mindfulness put into these efforts is plain, and underscored by the Cruz couple’s intimate discussion of the significance of emotional release. Soon, the woman to whom these ministrations are being applied is sobbing cathartic tears.

Elsewhere, the work of Masha Zusman, one of two Israeli artists featured, proves restorative. In her labor-intensive process Zusman makes engravings with a mechanical pen, and draws meticulously in ballpoint on found wood. While she might be best known for her works completed on immense, wooden packing crates, a selection of her smaller pieces on discarded wood panels is showcased here. To her materials she has added Hammerite, paint intended to be applied directly to metals. The decision to use this substance, which is not readily available in the United States, is inspired, as the color it achieves on wood is lush and sensuous. In Untitled (2015), gold Hammerite flows across the wood panel in creamy hills and valleys. It is tactile, almost three-dimensional, and I had the distinct sensation of wanting to run my hands over it. Zusman has engraved the top half of the panel with an intricate design reminiscent of a William Morris textile pattern, which she then colored completely with brick-red ballpoint. The work is fervid, even erotic in its juxtaposition of color and texture. In an exhibition that demands much sober contemplation, Zusman’s work is a welcome reminder of the tangible, the carnal, and the wonder that exists in the world.

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.” Co-curators Naomi Lev and Jovana Stokic open their curatorial statement with Simone Weil’s timely words. When I sat down to begin writing this after a couple days of reflection, I opened my computer to discover that overnight a gunman had entered a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, shot dead 49 people and wounded another 53. It was the worst shooting massacre in modern American history and I am despondent, marinating in the reinforced knowledge that so many different kinds of bodies can be so easily and callously disposed of in this country. I cannot separate this from the experience of seeing “With Passion.” To be passionate is to be moved by strong feelings or beliefs; to be compassionate is to be compelled to act because of the suffering of others. This small show in its small space is nonetheless a booming visual manifesto that calls not only for empathy, but also for revolutionary, loving action in defiance of the hatred and cruelty that have become familiar cultural markers. May it resonate.

The post Live Fully and Well: Art at Slag Gallery in a Time of Trauma appeared first on artcritical.

Curated by Carl E. Hazlewood
January 23 through February 21, 2016
558 St Johns Place (between Classon and Franklin avenues)
Brooklyn, 718 783 4438

To walk through FiveMyles Gallery is to wade through a room thick with a palpable scent, spiced like cinnamon with the strength of musk. The space feels eerily empty, save for three spotlit works. They rest, silent and static, waiting to be activated. Amanda Turner Pohan’s solo show, “Desiring to be Data for Others,” is charged.

On the left, 18 bottles of Pulsating (2016) is affixed to the wall — clear Plexiglas shelves surrounding a medicine cabinet mirror. An uncomfortably rigid metal chair awaits a subject to be reflected. 15 glass bottles, symmetrically displayed along the shelves, surround the mirror. Each bottle is wrapped in a semi-transparent label resembling standardized nutrition facts for foodstuffs. But where “nutrition facts” would have been written, the text instead reads “Pulsating.” “Shower Fluid (8 oz)” replaces “Serving Size.” “Bodies” replaces “Amount per Serving.” Duration, Element, Time in seconds, Pulse in heartbeats, and Breath in ppm of CO2 are the new indices with which we are concerned. Instead of corresponding percentages of recommended daily values, corresponding essences (in drops of essential oils) have been recorded: cypress, parsley, and fir needle. The lighting of this dramatic scene further replicates each bottle into three shadows (or additional bottles in the case of those set in front of the mirror).

To understand the content of these bottles, a viewer must take in the rest of the scene. Behind the chair, closer to the opposite wall, a corner shower has been installed to stand with its back exposed so that the piping mechanism is visible. The shower is illuminated from within; the effect resembles a halo. While condensation obscures the view into the shower from the front doors, the side panels are clearer. A brown pool of viscous fluid gels around the drain with seemingly clear water dripping from the showerhead above. Walking behind the shower, one can understand this closed loop: an opaque plastic container, like a gasoline jug, both feeds the water supply and retains waste liquid from the drain. Input becomes output becomes input, changing simply by being processed by the system. But where did this fluid originate? Return to the glass bottles and the apparently closed loop of the shower expands to include the mirror scene; what once seemed like a sparse room immediately feels as dense as its pervading scent.

The shower fluid has then gone through several stages. In order to create this melange of essential oils, the artist broke down the human breathing mechanism into measurable elements. Pohan then translated those recorded quantities into scents. The number of bottles implies a repeated procedure, though it is unclear if each bottle contains a different scent from a different human given the obscurity of their labels. Finally, Pohan returned the fluid to a zone of intimacy and human “waste” (like CO2) in the shower.

If this intricate system requires such significant labor from the artist, why does it feel as though the artist had no part in this installation, as though these scenes simply exist? The impersonality of each component — rigid chair, sterile shower, and uniform medicinal bottles corresponding to nameless bodies — lends an institutionalized quality to the work. There is little inherent humanness to these mass-produced products despite their latent sexuality (in this room, or in the context of their domestic purpose) and relation to an individual human body performing a ritualistic exercise.

The third piece in the room, Remnants and residues from my deceased mothers rug (2016), appears distant from the others — a mat of many-colored fibers pasted to a clear material hangs horizontally on the far wall. This mat, we read, is an imprint of the artist’s late grandmother’s carpet, which has accumulated such debris as hair, threads, crumbs and dirt over time. The seemingly abstract composition is then in fact the residue of the remains of a chance performance (presumably by several people) of daily rituals and relationships. While this work relates to the shower and mirror scenes by virtue of its interest in the relationship between intimacy and institutional frameworks, its process reveals an unravelling of the artist’s control over performance and representation. While a series of procedures distanced the shower scene from the original “performers” of the work (the work being the creation of the breathing measurements that became the fluid), the carpet fiber imprint is forensically related to specific bodies and actions. The artist’s (and viewer’s) desire to quantify, sterilize, and reflect on the body from a distance falls apart in the realization that none of these works severs its tie to embodiment; instead, we are made nauseous by the presence of absent bodies.

The post Sensing Absent Bodies: Amanda Turner Pohan at FiveMyles appeared first on artcritical.

October 10 to November 22, 2015
260 Richardson Street (at Kingsland Ave.)
Brooklyn, 646 729 4682

Nicola Ginzel’s recent solo exhibition at Brooklyn’s Cathouse FUNeral featured a considerable amount of small-scale mixed media objects and embroidered works on paper. Occasionally framed but mostly hung directly on the wall, these works were shown in close proximity and at an unusual height. Allowing only a tall viewer to peruse them at eye-level, works could easily be inspected both frontally, as well as slightly from below. This made for an intimate acquaintance between viewer and subject, serving Ginzel’s work particularly well. Rooted in the playful mixture of eclectic materials, her enchanting concoctions aim to not only disguise but to reinvent the familiar; she adds value not where it was lost, but where it hardly existed in the first place.

Hybrids between sculpture and painting, Ginzel’s objects involve a staggering amount of found, fragmented, and usually random ingredients. The latter can range from tea bags, mohair, wax, thread, gaffers tape, wasp nest, felt, clothing remnants, rubber band and gold leaf, to dirt. Mixed, re-matched, and altered, the remnants are stripped off their former functionality and everyday context. However, that does not equate with a loss of meaning. In fact, Ginzel’s hand-sized objects can exude an almost shamanistic quality. One might easily imagine them playing an important part in some ritual. The fact that some of the materials involved are gathered in specific places, including dirt from the music haven Muscle Shoals in Alabama, for example, enhances this notion.

In addition to her three-dimensional works, Ginzel also continuously embroiders various scraps of paper. These can either be discarded snippets of mass-produced candy wrappers or popcorn packages, for example, or involve more personal notations, such as schedules, index cards, or specifically selected book pages. Stitch-by-stitch, these mundane items are elevated from the commonplace to the carefully considered. By tenderly abstracting her materials, Ginzel helps them to obtain a sense of preciousness and even an air of Romanticism.

In order to provide a comprehensive overview of Ginzel’s oeuvre, “My Bed is Made of Atoms” presented a selection of works from the past 15 years. In that period she has consistently found inspiration in mainstream culture. However, it is the elegant execution of her work, as well as her careful handling of her materials, that reveal a high regard for craft. She is interested in interacting with her subjects in a simple and yet profound way, or as she has pointed out: “It is in the simplicity and interaction, where the essence of life’s breath resides, not in the end result or goal achieved.”

The post Retrospective Scraps: A Survey of Work by Nicola Ginzel appeared first on artcritical.

December 12, 2014 through January 25, 2015
56 Bogart St (between Harrison Place and Grattan Street)
Brooklyn, 718 473 0819

Deanna Lee makes paintings and drawings that reference several influences: the biology slides she looked at while growing up (her mother is a scientist), the actual pattern of the grain of the wood she paints on, her heritage as a Chinese-American artist who has copied reproductions of Asian paintings. These experiences and conditions have resulted in very good art; her paintings demonstrate a fascination with the cusp between abstraction and figuration. The latter is evident in Lee’s treatment of her imagery, which can suggest topological maps or, in her ink drawings, some of the Chinese landscapes she is familiar with or the jagged images of an artist like Clyfford Still — one painting is directly inspired by the American painter. Lee shows us how a miscellany of influences can enrich and deepen our experience of painting, especially in New York City, where so many artists come from different backgrounds. We are by now quite used to the various reports of artists with different experiences from our own. It is clear that this has been the strength of New York as a cultural capital, which remains a center for artists who want to work out relations between American culture and their own new — or in Lee’s case, relatively new — history of immigration.

Lee’s art evokes feelings of nostalgia for lost ways of seeing. But she regularly contemporizes her perceptions by seeking unusual sources for her art. In clfrd (2014), clearly a reference to AbEx painter Clyfford Still’s style, Lee also constructs an elegant gouache-and-acrylic composition that builds off the lines of wood grain on the face of her panel support. These lines occupy large passages in the picture, particularly the vertical body of light purple on the left side of the work. In the middle, viewers find a ragged vertical of yellow that cuts into the purple hue seen on either side of it. Some deep red, mostly enclosed by the purple, shows through toward the edges of clfrd; the origins of the painting’s beauty derive from a tradition well understood in America, where Still’s legacy is well known. Lee’s reading of the past shows us how a painter can find a dimension of change in the idiom she works with.

In AWGP 3 (2013), Lee works on a smaller scale; the painting’s dimensions are nine by twelve inches. Repetitive light-blue lines, again a reflection of the wood grain beneath, look a bit like a mountainous Chinese landscape. They occur on a background that changes from a purple below to olive green above, with a curling mauve strip dividing the two areas. The work leans toward the decorative, but not in a negative way; one is reminded of the high hills and broad mists of Asian painting traditions. There is a point where Western abstraction and Asian traditional art meet, for the latter’s painterly effects can be isolated and turned into something non-objective. AWGP 2 (2013), another small painting, works in a similar way. The picture, which presents regular horizontal lines of dark purple repeating above two equally divided green grounds (one a dark forest color and the other an acid green), could be the detail of a contour map. Its thin strips begin with a lake-like image inserted at the bottom of the composition. Here the feeling is that of an oasis, a point of reference dictated by harmony. It resides in what could be an actual place, one very nicely detailed by the painter.

Eagle Street 1 (2014), one of six ink works on vellum put up in the show, continues with the notion of a repeated outline, in this case showcasing the closely patterned cracks of her studio wall. Looking a lot like the skin of an onion, the painting has several thin lines that edge out of the body of the bulging image. One of the best things about Lee’s art is the multiplicity of its references, which in this instance range from landscape to abstraction to the rendering of a particular thing. Her work’s ability to bring up several allusions at once is one of its greatest strengths. As a painter, Lee offers us a language that is more widespread in its inspiration than it seems. Moreover, the specificity of its structure — the studio wall pattern — allows Lee to work from a reference that is culturally neutral, even if the image’s material — ink — looks to a Chinese past. As a method, this is extremely interesting, for it supposes that the means of inspiration can be as specific and local as the place where one makes art, as the title of the piece indicates. In general, Lee’s paintings remind us that today’s artists often explore, more than kind of, cultural effect; Lee does this extremely well.

The post The Pictorial: Deanna Lee on the Cusp of Figuration and Abstraction appeared first on artcritical.

January 10 through February 22, 2015
60 N 6th Street (between Wythe and Kent streets)
Brooklyn, 718 599 4884

In the event that it ever becomes possible to X-ray the human imagination, the results will presumably look a lot like Susan Bee’s “Photograms and Altered Photos from the 1970s.” The dozens of small, unframed works included in this exhibition feature hand-drawn squiggles, primal daubs, imperfect patterns, and bleached silhouettes of found materials that reach out of darkness like weeds or the dreamy remnants of a half-formed thought. All rendered within a dense yet fluid spectrum of surprisingly nuanced (if yellow-tinged) grayscale, the images could also just as easily be isolated stills from a tenderfoot animated film or snapshots beamed from some corner of the Universe where the earpiece of a rotary telephone or pair of scissors float amid other random bits of cosmic detritus. A number of pieces are also whimsically hand tinted, embellished by thin pastels and near-neon hues that scrape and bundle their way through an eerie not-quite black-and-white world. Overall, the collection is inquisitive and crisp, containing something of the prime quality W Somerset Maugham once ascribed to rum punch: it has “the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics.”

The works are presented in clusters of series, each marked by its own thematic and aesthetic parameters. One sequence, shown on the gallery’s north wall, is reminiscent of the gangling, angular microbes one might find under a microscope and the patchy cultures grown in a Petri dish; others, on the south wall, evoke Anna Atkins’s botanical impressions of plant life and the Impressionists’ proclivity for employing thick upward strokes to capture the bloom and sway of a vertiginous sweep of lawn. Untitled (ca. 1979) is especially energetic, its many blurred, fern-shaped cross-sections flushed with soft cerise, peony pink, rheumy chartreuse and cornflower blue. Another series, this one pinned to the east wall, is more formal and austere, containing only a few colorless overlapping triangles of various weights and sizes. Here, each photogram focuses intently on the interaction of forms and subtle shifts in tone, not unlike Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square series. This attention to relationships between items anticipates the careful relationships Bee now establishes between figures in her current painting practice. One can see the connection, but also the distance travelled. Who knew that addressing how one triangle converses with another, or how two equilaterals act when forced to lean into each other and share a single space, could be so tender, or so telling?

Despite their many differences, these works all have one thing in common: they are, first and foremost, exploratory. Created during and after the time Bee was writing her graduate thesis on the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, many of the images feel like direct echoes of those she studied so intently, made using whatever objects she found lying around her studio. The process has the effect of making even the most mundane office supplies appear ghostly and phenomenal, giving everything from nuts and bolts to tape dispensers and unruly tangles of wire a second life, or perhaps only the shade of a life. Yet their mimicry is not a flaw, but rather the key to their distinction. These works designate one phase in the career of a deeply curious artist who makes in order to understand, producing works that feel kinesthetic and engage in a pedagogic dialogue with their source material. They are tests — then for the artist to make, and now for the viewer to observe. They are a game, an exercise, a puzzle that not only challenges you to ask, “What is that thing?” but then dares you to go ahead and fill in the blank.

In this critic’s opinion, the photogram is a dramatic but inherently limited medium, very much in the line of “you’ve see one, you’ve seen them all.” But here, the singular experience of viewing and time traveling with the artist slices right through the material’s potential shortcomings. These works are the unassuming glimpses of a younger, more uncertain self, the apt pupil who holds the camera and looks right past us and into the future in Untitled (1977). We don’t know what she sees, but perhaps we can begin to imagine.

The post Visual Scientific Poetry: Susan Bee’s Photograms appeared first on artcritical.

Elizabeth Ferry’s exhibition “Dems Toad,” at Honey Ramka through November 23, is about transformation from one being into another, from one image into another. It features almost 20 new works, both paintings and sculptures. Two steles, each made from a Styrofoam block measuring 1 by 4 by 8 feet, dominate the gallery. The first, Diver (2014), lies supine by the entrance, a table as well as a sarcophagus. A constellation of pink and red cast strawberries in the outline of a human form have been inset into a wash of blue, a billowy veil of color that has been applied to the porous and absorbent Hydrocal surface — this is painting via libation rather than gesture. Diver may be a self-portrait — it is a woman, with breasts of cast grapefruits and a lemon with a single sliver removed for genitalia, the facial features made of polished stones, with various crystalline and smoothed minerals placed throughout the field of cast berries. The vegetal forms are an offering of Cain, organic and benevolent shapes — food that is found or grown.

Opposing Diver stands Just Her (2014), a solid, vertical block of carved Styrofoam. Just Her is less human, or possibly not at all. It has a face detailed in polished stones, as with Diver, but the massive body reads more like a looming creature, and the non-threatening fruit forms have been replaced by two spiky cast pineapples with geode irises for eyes — the vengeance of Cain? The body of the creature is decked with repetitive, multicolored polka dots — this is a colder being. Ferry’s serene Diver, laid out in bright joyous colors like a sheet of chalky candy buttons or acid tabs, speaks the pleasures of the flesh and Dionysian decadence, while Just Her, with its black and grey outline and mottled spots, is a tortured amalgam of fierceness, anger and darker angels, with a bouquet of withered wildflowers inserted in its heart.

The entire oeuvre of the show follows this dichotomy: a lot of child-like, shiny cheerfulness paired with much harsher stuff. Consisting mostly of paintings in enamel on paper or canvas, there are shadowy and sinister motifs contrasted with bright, happy animal forms as stand-ins for Freudian-inflected sexual imagery. Ferry works mostly with totemic geometries and is very didactic in her differentiations: a rainbow totem of spread thighs presents both pussies and asses rendered with an almost hieroglyphic simplicity and bluntness, Wigs On Holes Out (2014) is about an openness of objectification between the viewer and the viewed. The numerous Toadem paintings (all 2014) are visual synonyms for the spread legs, but the bulging eyes of the frogs and their generally good-natured expressions hide the sexual quagmire of the fraught gender politics of Wigs On Holes Out. The frogs merely represent sex now in a watered down reference, and have lost their baggage, which isn’t fair to the rigor of symbolism — they offer pretty and graphic sexual overtones, but lack the real excitement and possible tension and degradation of the explicit imagery.

Similarly, Lucky, which transforms a pachyderm into a four-leaf clover, and Hi (both 2014), which shows the same mammal in blue and red, happily spraying from its trunk, represent the elephant as stand-in for a phallus, one that is pissing or ejaculating — marking territory or inseminating — both aggressive acts. Toad and elephant as woman and man at their most receptive and penetrative, respectively — these iconic tropes are executed in a self-consciously over-the-top, colorful, and casual style that may be a bit too glib to get the point across to many viewers. It is in the chaos of Wigs On Holes Out and the explanatorily titled Girard Totem (2014), which refers to the philosopher Rene Girard, a proponent of the presence of coded sacrificial substitutions in anthropological symbolism, that Ferry’s drippy expressionism coalesces into a deeper statement. Ferry is the assistant to painter Joyce Pensato, and as is always the case, connections can be drawn between master and assistant (and that is a wonderful thing!). Ferry embraces the shine and chaotic brushwork of Pensato, as well as the penchant for iconic simple imagery, but with Wigs On Holes Out she brings a personalized sexuality. In Girard Totem she is open about the darker side of her sweet animal obsession. That totem is about spirits and about death and sacrifice, about never getting something for nothing.

The deeper, more poignant paintings continue with the pair of acrylic-on-linen paintings, called Online and Online with Lashes (both 2014). Like the two sculptures, which generate form from repetition of symbols, Online creates a haunting pattern from six pairs of eyes, distilling humans down to the windows of the soul. Leaving the pair of paintings ambiguous is Online With Lashes, which is the same except with the feminizing detail of long eyelashes. Is this meant to represent a male/female dyad? The open-endedness of the pairing is very satisfying. But the symbolism of the eyes comes to a very predictable halt with Sunrise Sunset (1994) and The Moon (2014), a result that is perhaps unavoidable, in that there are an infinite number of readings, but only a limited number of symbols in the end.

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The brain is the king of the organs. The brain’s shape and structure define our humanity, though its method of governance over our bodies and actions remains largely a mystery. In “Belief System” at Soloway Gallery, Munro Galloway bares his brain. It’s not preserved in a jar for our scientific prodding; instead he slowly and intimately reveals it in glimpses, repetitions, and uncertainties. The accumulation of these revelations is confounding. “Belief System” includes works on canvas, drawings and books, with Galloway moving fluidly between different media. The canvases are oil and acrylic, inkjet prints, or some combination of both; the drawings layer collage, ink and gouache. Galloway has built out a low shelf to display three of the canvases and another purpose-built shelf shows the drawings. Interspersed among these drawings are books he has been making for a number of years. The works function together — a system — formed out of Galloway’s actions and use of material. The result is work that tantalizingly hovers between imagination and existence.

A walk through the canvases is a needed precursor to the drawings and books in the back room. The canvases appear graphic and accessible. In 65” x 50” (Lean Over Fat) (2014), abstract, bright yellow squares and lines are painted with a thick brush. Grey and white lines, squares and bell-like shapes are rendered more like sketches. “65”” was jotted down in the top left corner and “50”” in the bottom right. The size, a notation typically found on the back of the work, is put for any to see. The painting is almost stripped bare in its simplicity and openness — Galloway’s process seems clear, just from the title. 65” x 50” are its dimensions. The phrase “lean over fat” reverses a rule of oil painting where “fat” paint (as the name implies, there is a high oil-to-pigment ratio) is applied over “leaner” paint (with a lower oil-to-pigment ratio), as the latter dries more quickly than the former. By applying the oil lean over fat, the surface is more likely to crack. The dimensions on the canvas and the method by which the paint was applied in the title integrates the decisions made by Galloway during painting to the work as it is now apprehended by the viewer. The openness of the canvases insists on being taken at face value, but after looking at the shelf of books and drawings, they change.

The drawings are of brain slices — the shape of two spongy lobes repeats with permutations. All titled Brain Drawing, they are made on a variety of found paper, including color charts, takeout menus and exhibition flyers. Brain Drawing (2014), on the top left shelf, is ink and gouache drawn on ledger paper. The brain shape is drawn in black ink. Inside of this shape are two connected rectangles diagonally bisected by a line with bulbous ends. Galloway loosely applied blotches of black ink and washes of blue that permeate the shapes. More precisely, the black ink of the rectangles has been colored yellow. The identical shape of the yellow rectangles in both 65” x 50” (Lean Over Fat) and Brain Drawing imply a derivation. But, where typically a painting resolves or completes a drawing, after viewing Brain Drawing, 65” x 50” seems less finished. Instead, it looks like a memory or a strong impression of the drawing.

Galloway has made artist’s books for many years. Vessel States (2009) uses an art catalogue as its base. Galloway has left the captions (written in German) alone, but has also placed clunky and ill-fitting paper cutouts over the objects in the images. His collages are reproduced in black and white to make a seamless surface. A bronze or marble hand juts out from behind a paper covering — a bit of toe and a marble plinth are also visible. Again, there is interplay between revelation and mystery. In the books, this interaction forms the story as it unfolds in time as a narrative. The relationship between Brain Drawing and 65” x 50” is also a narrative, not linear as in the books, but circuitous with connections that fire like synapses.

Another Brain Drawing (2014) is drawn on a color chart. Black and red form a field for the white brain shape; there are scrawled nonsensical notations and circles of orange, pink, green, and yellow within the silhouetted organ. Despite these layers, the color chart comes through in different degrees of visibility. In 64” x 48” (Nervous System) (2014), Galloway has enlarged and inkjet-printed the same color chart onto a canvas on which he had already painted a scramble of different colors. It is difficult to tell the difference between paint and inkjet-print on the canvas. Galloway visually connects painting and inkjet-printing in 66.5” x 50.5” (2014). The image is barely a brain. Multi-colored lines jig and stutter like a printer running out of ink, but the canvas is not an inkjet, but a direct monoprint from another painted canvas. There is an increasingly complicated interplay of repetitions through the image of the brain and the use of materials and technology. These repetitions play with expectation — nothing can be assumed despite previous experience with other work in the show.

The materiality of the works displayed in “Belief System” is continually undercut by the intricacies of the works within the “system.” Simplicity hides complexity as a raw painting becomes a finished drawing. Abstract fragments are glimpses of an unknown more in a print from a painting. The paper of a drawing repeats as the pigment on a canvas. Art making intimately touches and pushes at something both fundamental and unknown within us: it is imagination mutating into existence and mystery founding belief.

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Stephen Maine: Halftone Paintings at 490 Atlantic Gallery
April 5 to May 10, 2014
490 Atlantic Avenue (between Nevins Street and Third Avenue)
Brooklyn, 718 344 4856

Surface and the illusion of surface are the heart of the matter in the work of two abstract painters whose recent exhibitions in Brooklyn dangle the mystery of process and the indisputable facticity of material before the viewer. Stephen Maine’s paintings utilize a Luddite methodology that mimics and critiques the patterns of higher-tech dot printing processes while Amalia Piccinini coats her canvases in skeins of dark stains with accretions of paint, forming a self-consciously imperfect and mottled texture. Both artists circumvent typical questions of composition, instead conceptualizing painting as coating, skin or happy coincidence: within these alternative parameters though, they generate a considered reappraisal of recognized tropes.

Piccinini’s approach to paint explicitly invites many interpretations. Unabashedly abstract, they nonetheless invoke the underside of a Tiepolo thunderhead or the hills in the background of an El Greco crucifixion — there is a classicizing painterly style at work here. But her method of applying oil and acrylic paint implies both intentionality and accident, and revels in pushing the viewer into a position of interlocutor with the canvas. Her gloomy, dark pieces are a primer of references to Abstract Expressionism; the entire canon of that period contributes details, but as an artist she is less precious or egocentric and more mischievous. Resembling fireworks fading in a dark sky, Touch (2014) is a light-absorbing darkling canvas — transparent colors drizzle and trickle into nothing, and as they do, the pigment encounters dried bumps on the surface. Though there is the sense that the colors fulfill a careful and valuable role within the artist’s canvas, it is also apparent that they have been added later and are forced to contend with the preexisting lumps, scuffs and scumbles on the surface. Into this milieu Piccinini also adds glazes, creating pools of glittering reflectivity, versus regions of brooding matte black.

Stephen Maine’s Halftone paintings harness that seductive graininess of imperfect technological reproduction. Using a monoprinting or stamping method to apply acrylic to the canvas, he layered veils of dots of various tints and hues over each other and in so doing generates a picture plane that on the one hand insists on some unknown algorithm of order — implicit in the idea of mechanical reproduction is the assumption that there is a tool interface, a disjunction between the hand of the artist and the final work of art, allowing for repetition. Conversely, Maine’s process is purposely flawed in terms of reproducibility; he doesn’t know what the end result will be and therefore the pieces are inevitably unique. The images are titled in numbered series, with a mock scientific rigor, as for example: HP13-0701, HP13-0702, HP13-0704 and HP13-0706 (all 2013). These four are all identical in size (20 x 16 inches) and do resemble each other in color — light blue points over an orange background — but their similarities are like a stop motion sequence of a cloud or billow of smoke. The viewer finds herself uncomfortably situated between the cartoonish deconstruction of the printed image of Lichtenstein or Polke and the indulgence in mechanical process of Warhol’s silkscreens. Within this context Maine’s gorgeous paintings seem like casual studies of entropy, a wily clockmaker winding up a machine to produce sexy mistakes.

HP12-1212 (2012) layers an inconsistent field of black pixels over a pale ochre base. It yields an imaginative graphic cartography that the mind automatically leaps to find some recognizable point of reference for. If we can’t discern the metaphorical value behind the strength of one patch over another, as in a topographical diagram, the patterns of darkness and blind spots in the imprint offer an insight into the primitive and capricious nature of Maine’s process. But it is impossible to tell if the original pattern is identical to its doppelganger, or if something was lost in translation. Along the edge, the background bursts through like a slide melting in a projector, but again the singular idiosyncrasies of the surface belie the fact that though this looks like a copy, it is one with no apparent referent. The familiarity is very confounding. HP11-0402 (2011) is less frustrating, but again for no reason in particular except that the black dots are more material and they lie over a vibrant orange base and approximate a composition with more finality — the devil is in the details.

Piccinini’s pieces are more amorphously formed and much more diffuse in their legibility. Untitled (2013), a horizontal black canvas with eruptions of orange that vary in degrees of saturation — burning brightly, but quickly melting back into the black or floating off in ghostly sheets and billows — perhaps projects a sense of despair and deep, unsettled anger on the part of the artist. Piccinini embraces the proclivities of the media to flow and pool and seeks to erase a sense of hand. She engages in the psychological game of pushing our buttons with color, and though all the works evince a visceral response through the aforementioned art-imitating-nature application of pure abstraction, some, such as the multicolored Touch and Privilege (2014), employ a more stilted and painterly, but more effective approach to luring in the viewer.

The amped up imitation of natural randomness is a favorite pastime of the abstract painter: the hallucinogenic marble passages in Fra Angelico, Hockney’s meditations on ripples in a pool or Alex Hay’s reproductions of wood grain and cracked paint. Both Piccinini and Maine inhabit the interstitial realm of having their paintings appear reminiscent of something, but that resemblance is to the most ambiguous of models: cloudy landscapes and blown-up Xeroxes. In line with their fabrication, the paintings seem imitative of process itself. Various crystalline effulgences appear to well up from Piccinini’s paintings while Maine’s conceit may be time-based: oxidation or the leaching away of a surface.

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