June 21 to July 31, 2015
299 Grand Street (between Eldridge and Allen streets)
New York, 212 510 7646

Marc Straus’s recently closed summer group show, “Gray Would Be the Color, If I Had a Heart,” showcased nearly 30 artists, spread through three galleries on two floors. Each artwork was rendered primarily in grayscale and the show went far beyond grisaille studies, including gelatin silver photographs, drawings, prints, and sculptures. That kind of excess is, although not ideal, pretty much to be expected with a lot of summer group shows. “Gray…” exceeded many similar exhibitions in its more-or-less consistent tone; and it basically achieved its aim of selecting works intended to be, as the press release puts it, “Not completely hopeless. Not utterly bleak. Not fully shrouded in darkness.” The maudlin grimness, which is supposed to be tinged with optimism, is excessive, too. But there were some really great artworks, silver lining or no.

Kind of surprisingly, few of them were monochromes. Although the show celebrates gray, it doesn’t remain there alone, and it recognizes that the color itself is broad: cool grays, warm ones, dark, light, tinted with pink, or blue, brown, orange, nothing at all, reflective, matte, symbolic or concrete, and so on.

There are contrasts from the start: near the gallery’s entrance is a photocollage diptych by VALIE EXPORT, showing a woman’s face towering over and observing a hypnagogic modernist cityscape, set next to two small assemblages by Kristjan Gudmundsson, made by adhering mechanical pencil leads in ordered rows on sheets of aluminum. In a nearby corner of the gallery, Rona Pondick’s man-headed dog sculpture, Fox (1998 – 99), recalls sci-fi horror from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Mars Attacks! It uses an image variously intended as horrific or absurd. One realizes that chimeras — aesthetic, biological, conceptual, whatever — are usually both.

Here also hangs a totemic punching bag by Jeffrey Gibson, a tight drawing by Joyce Pensato and Matt Ducklo’s South Parkway East Church (2011), a black-and-white photo of a small bus, used by a Memphis church, locked behind a chain-link pen in the middle of an empty parking lot at night. Like a lot of the work here, these simple, spare images are iconic and direct.

Upstairs, the show doesn’t hang quite so neatly together, or at least some of the works in it fall flat. Diana Shpungin’s A Failure of Memory (2015) suffers from a bland execution, as does Grayson Cox’s Vent (2015). The artists’ material choices are unclear: why is Shpungin’s wastebasket cut so loosely in half? Why are the shorn edges lined with plaster-cast material? Why is Cox’s painting framed in a large plywood casing? Why does the frame look so unfinished compared to the naturalism of the painting embedded within it at an angle?

Although Zlatan Vehabovic’s image of a large, dead whale, called Rock Bottom Riser (2014), is painted fussily, the image has deep roots in Dutch printmaking, and it’s a powerful one: a morbid leviathan. One reason that the icon is so common, besides its allegorical value, is because its one that recurs under human guidance. Whales have been threatened for centuries, first by large-scale hunting, and now by climactic catastrophe. Two works by Sam Trioli, hung side-by-side — Harry S. Truman (2014) and Untitled (Vibrations) from 2013 — show in photorealistic detail the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, and the man who ordered such weapons dropped on Japan 70 years ago. These, at least, are utterly bleak.

Also upstairs is a small and reserved etching by Jasper Johns: an image of one of his pewter-colored flashlight sculptures, titled Flashlight (1967 – 69). Johns was a gray eminence who sort of inspired the much-remarked on work of another of the color’s most famous painters, Brice Marden, whose early monochromes likely subsequently influence some of the other artists on view, such as Jessica Dickinson, Geoff Hippenstiel and Jim Lee. These artists are still exploring the marriage of surface, color and image. And for whatever reason (there are probably several that the artists would cite) gray is a good way to do that.

Finally, Dove Bradshaw’s 2013 painting, Contingency (Snow Tracks), shows a really concrete, absolute way to think about color’s use in art. Bradshaw made the painting by applying liver of sulfur to a silver-coated canvas (the former substance reacts to patinate the latter). Her technique here and in other works uses chance-based methods — developed by Johns’s friends Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage — in order to create images rooted in the precise relationship of one chemical to another. There’s nothing more factual than that. It’s not morose or bright, just true. Another fact is that this show had a lot of interesting work, a mélange. I don’t know about anyone else’s heart, but mine is there: it’s a gray fact.

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Exhibition Two
Fort Zachary Taylor State Park
March 1 – April 18, 2009

Strong, spirited, and brought to life with industry and intelligence, this year’s Sculpture Key West exhibition offered an engaging sampling of contemporary works. Held for the past nine years in its current form, this ambitious outdoor exhibition occurs in two main exhibition sites on the tropical island of Florida’s Key West and features the work of local, national and international artists. This year’s head curator was Shamim Momin of the Whitney Museum, who worked closely with Exhibitions Director Karley Klopfenstein and a small jury to shape what proved to be a diverse show of 32 works from 37 artists. Sculpture Key West’s approach has always been brave: the artists have only a few days – working in the heat, wind and rain – to execute their pieces, which are then expected to remain intact, or at least onsite, until being dismantled two months later. The drama inherent to such a logistically challenging process is palpable in the final result, and lends the show an energy, unity and sheer like-ability foreign to most group exhibitions.

This is not to say that every piece was a success. Some sculptures suffered in the elements, a small few were not able be on view for the duration of the show, and a couple of the pieces seemed indicative of nothing so much as an artist cracking under  pressure and leaving the site in a tantrum. Within an otherwise overwhelmingly successful exhibition, however, these minor setbacks served as material proof of Sculpture Key West’s admirable acceptance of risk as a necessary factor in the creation of serious, exciting work.

One of the strongest elements of the show was the considered placement of works within the very different main sites of the Gardens at West Martello Tower and Fort Zachary Taylor State Park. Although both venues center around nineteenth-century military fortifications, the Gardens are a series of cloistered green spaces set amid meandering brickwork, and Fort Taylor Zachary Park is a treeless plain by the water’s edge. The contrast in setting was used to exceptional effect, literally doubling the possibilities of an already broadly defined medium.

The visual competition of the Gardens at the West Martello Site, with its profusion of outrageous tropical flora,  was so intense as to have necessitated, for most artists, an unconventional sculptural approach –  that of camouflage and surprise. Looming in the treetops, Ludwica Ogorzelec’s Space Crystallization (all works 2009) is the result of impressive technique of woven plastic film. This curious structure extends and falls into space, held in tension with knots and weights that exploit the flex and pull of an unexpected material. Densely translucent, Ogorzelec’s piece requires a slow looking-into in order to be properly seen, and defies instinctive attempts to assess properties of mass, material and contour. The oversized crocheted patterns of Liliana Crespi’s Captured, slung amid the garden foliage, similarly challenge conventional readings, constituted as they are by rope and holes, and having little in the way of weight and form in any regular sense. Bringing to mind the toils of a modern-day Arachne, Crespi’s piece elegantly alludes to the tense relationship between the natural and man-made, all the while echoing the concentrically unfurling patterns of the buds and blossoms close-by. Jamey Grimes’ carefully crafted, corrugated plastic work Between Space,which would almost be too smooth a read in a gallery space, is set here to magical effect under the latticework of a bower where it is forced to do all-out battle with the brilliance and shadow-silhouette of tropical light.

The impact of these works is intentionally subtle, but sufficient for sharpening the senses. Pay attention could have been the curatorial mantra for this section of the show, and the directive was acted out in the work of Karen McCoy and Robert Carl, whose “listening trumpets” randomly prompt visitors throughout the site to tune-in to the sensorial possibilities of their fantastical surroundings.

The Fort Zachary venue, bordered by brick and ocean, is infused with that potent blend of the paradisiacal and militaristic encountered throughout the tropics in places of past dispute and defense. Many of the works on this site responded to the sense of threat intrinsic to the presence of the fort, other to the site’s identity as a landing place for immigrants arriving by sea. Even the more lighthearted works suggest – like the landscape that is both holiday-like and vaguely ominous – that things are not always as they appear. The sculptures are here set out along what felt like and emotional scale and viewers making their way along the windswept space encounter a progression of play, puzzlement, unease and awe in what amounted to a very moving experience.

Towards the beginning of this trek are a number of pieces that delight and startle with a mischievous sensibility. Diana Shpungin’s work Perfect Disconnect appear s to be two ordinary payphones, except that they are impossibly fused, and emit the clicks and dial tones of a doubly-confounded communication. Jackson Martin’s Rooted is a northern evergreen dwarfed within an enormous burlap root-sac, and while looking like a bit of landscaping gone wrong, the piece acts as a succinct expression of the anxieties surrounding issues of upheaval and belonging. Anja Marais’ False Security is just that: a hot-pink trailer suggestive of a life-size Barbie at play, until a peek inside reveals a surreal alternative. Owen Mundy and Joelle Dietrick’s curved mirror placed against the dazzling shoreline takes the form of a light-apparition, a teasing mirage.

Moving out from the populated section of the park, the works become more structured, almost monumental. These pieces are bold enough to stand up to the starker surroundings, and don’t shy away either from tackling themes of beauty, message and form. Paige Pedri’sEmancipation, placed right against the water’s edge, is a statement of strength both in the abstract and the actual. A soaring tower of corresponding forms, Pedri’s work spoke simultaneously of patterns of flight, a struggle against gravity, and the tangible ambition of an artist truly engaged. Equally expansive, thought oriented along the horizontal plane, was the reflective 250’ ramp engineered by Steven Durow and Jessica Cappiello that charted a slow and steady ascent towards the blue it mirrored above. Lori Nozick built an irresistible, if somewhat arbitrary, structure from pure salt bricks, and Nathaniel Hein and Jennifer Gonzales fashioned a heart-wrenching piece, in which the plastic-bag panels of a greenhouse allowed tender young shoots just enough air to sprout, only to then suffocate.

The most successful sculptures stood out in their ability to draw complex emotional resonance from simple material statements. Lauren P. McAloon’s Threshold is a hauntingly beautiful gathering of tall bamboo “flutes” that sing, whistle and sigh almost unceasingly into a relentless sea-wind. Completed with the worn-rudders of Cuban chug boats, the plaintive cry of McAloon’s work isn’t subtle – but its effectiveness is undeniable.  Julia Handshue’s piece,Release/Recovery, involves the dissemination of exquisite, serial-numbered, porcelain pods throughout both sites for the purposes of discovery and re-documentation. Though cooly-executed, the piece presents in perfect miniature an object-cycle of lost-and-found, stirring unexpected associations of delight and regret.

Karlis Rekevic’s work consists of white plaster structures that allude, obliquely, to nearby architectural features. In a sophisticated play of multiple forms, Rekevic’s piece simultaneously builds up and subverts an individualized system of construction, in which the forces of assertion, recession, weight and support are in constant play. More than any other artist in the show, this work seemed involved with sculpture as a fully three-dimensional phenomenon, as opposed to a sophisticated form of communication through object means. It is remarkable, however, that nearly all of the works in the show seemed to possess their own internal dignity; expressing within these challenging conditions that the act of sculpture is one that is uncertain, vulnerable, and at its best heroic.

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