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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Two days after I’d visited the 1st Annual Governor’s Island Art Fair, the New York Times reported that the island was experiencing a “rebirth” as a weekend destination for jaded New Yorkers–and so it is, with lawns for picnics, avenues for strolling, bicycle paths, concerts, etc. it’s also very easy to get to: Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, the free ferry leaves every half hour from the terminal right next to for the Staten Island Ferry. terminal. The ride is only seven minutes across New York Harbor, and already you can admire the magnificent views of the Statue of Liberty, the Manhattan skyline and so on..

The art fair is billed as “organized entirely by artists, for artists—and the public’s enjoyment.” What a pleasant change of pace from most of our big art fairs, especially the various Armory Shows, which are organized by dealers and have nothing but booths named for dealers. Some of the artists on view at Governor’s Island are represented by dealers, and some aren’t, but nothing is made of this: the spirit here is not to make distinctions based upon commercial appeal. Inevitably, some of the work is pretty amateurish, but the best of it is extremely refreshing, because it manifests a sensibility one doesn’t find too often in Chelsea. Chelsea is into “edginess.” With some exceptions, of course, the art there is apt to have bite. By contrast, the best art on view at Governor’s Island is gentler, less aggressive, more idealistic. There is much humor here, but it’s innocent, not tendentious (to use Sigmund Freud’s distinction): art that is funny in and of itself, not art with a target.

Building 114 at Governor’s Island, a neo-Georgian structure erected in 1934 and formerly a nurses’ residence, is ideal for this art fair, since it includes many little rooms and hallways . The official list of forty-six artists with exhibitions in Building 114 shows that the emphasis is on painting, with thirty-one painters listed, eight installation artists, four photographers and one show each of sculpture, sound, and scanograph (a special kind of photography). The installations are the weakest part of the show—possibly because installations are so popular in Chelsea that most installation artists don’t need an additional outlet. The only installation that came off for me was “Ocean Biography,” by Caroline Cox, a roomful of delicate pale-blue and white weblike bundles made of horsehair tubing, produce packing net and other materials, hung from the ceiling.

The fair has been organized by an artists’ collective known as 4heads, and the four in question are all painters: Antony Zito, Ernie Sandidge, Nicole Laemmle and Preet Srivastava. To judge from their exhibits, Zito and Sandidge are experienced figure painters, the former focusing on the female face, the latter on the female nude. In Sandidge’s group of paintings, a nude wears a blue, rubbery-looking garment that cloaks her legs and ends in a pair of tail fins, turning her into a mermaid. He also exhibits a comical 56-inch high terra cotta sculpture of this subject: the lady looks as though she were just climbing into her garment and pulling it up around her.

Laemmle is one of the few abstract painters, exhibiting small panels covered with very narrow vertical stripes. I was reminded of the vertical stripe paintings that Gene Davis, the Washington color field painter, made his reputation with in the ‘60s, but Laemmle’s stripes seem narrower and the colors, more harmonious than Davis’s. Srivastava is a representational painter; her brushwork is very loose, excitingly feathery. Subjects range from landscape to fantasy to the straightforward portraiture of “Bharat,” a guitarist. The lower left-hand corner of “Bharat” looks white, therefore unfinished, but it balances off against the almost equally white space of the upper right-hand corner, dramatizing the diagonal thrust of Bharat’s body.

At least four other participants in the art fair stood out for me. Obaidullah Mamoon exhibits a haunting black-and-white sequence of photographs of “Bangladesh: River, Boats & Life.” Stefania Zamparelli’s show is dominated by her color photos of “the great game of buzkashi.” Buzkashi is an ancient, very distant relation of polo that uses the corpse of a goat stuffed with sand instead of a ball, and is played throughout Central Asia (Zamparelli’s photos were taken in Afghanistan in 2004-2005). The colorful milling crowds of horses and riders look to me like some grand academic painting—by a Soviet realist perhaps, or a battle scene by Meissonier, but because it’s photography and not painting, it’s less mannered, more truthful. Two more paintings that I liked were Helen Quinn’s “The Annunciation,” a wicked little gouache done on a field of gold leaf, and James Peterson”s “August, the Devil’s Playground” a strangely cheerful oil dominated by reds. Peterson’s vigorous Halloween-style epic features diabolical figures on either side of a female nude with angel wings. Quinn’s image impishly depicts a circus fat girl being impregnated through long rays of light from an elephant and is subtitled “a tribute to Fra Angelico and in vitro fertilization.”.

The best work in this show is by Ann Walsh, who hasn’t received the recognition she deserves.. Although she’s no spring chicken, she didn’t receive her M.A. from Syracuse University until the late ‘70s, and didn’t begin to exhibit in Manhattan until the ‘80s, when modernist artists were facing increasing difficulty in getting exposure (unless they’d already been exhibiting since the ‘60s). Walsh would undoubtedly choose Kenneth Noland as one of her artistic ancestors, but another might well be ‘60s minimalism, often equated to modernism but in my opinion a critique of it, taking abstraction to a logical, therefore absurd extreme. Walsh’s “paintings” are made of horizontal bands of vinyl bound onto Plexiglas or board. They’re not big, and they look simple, but they have an effervescent lightness, balance and proportion that have to be seen in the flesh to be fully appreciated. “Blush” is a typing-paper-sized study in pinks and purples whose middle band is semi-transparent. It’s been photographed at an angle so the viewer can see that it’s two inches thick (one also sees the opaque end to the semi-transparent band). The two-inch thickness enables “Blush” to stand upright by itself, technologically speaking—though esthetically speaking, it stands by itself as well.

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