September 7 to October 7, 2018
56 Bogart Street, between Harrison Place and Grattan Street
Brooklyn, slaggallery.com

On a visit to Slag Gallery to view Tim Kent’s solo show (his third with the gallery), the artist was found deep in conversation with a visitor about the history of the electrical grid system. Somewhere between his description of “the largest machine on earth” and his deliberations on the “efficacy of coal-powered plants,” however, I tuned out the lesson and entered the painting on the wall behind him, Isotopia, a large landscape where a yellow matrix hums though a desiccated valley. While Kent has an encyclopedic mind for his chosen subject, in Dark Pools and Data Lakes, the paintings themselves are where the titans of technology, politics, and ecology are battling it out.

The paintings are large, over eight feet, and Kent evidently made them quickly, with all but two stretched and painted since June. The energy of that physical struggle, the speed of the attack, is palpable. His forms are at once complex and boldly wrought. Their roughhewn quality, counterintuitively, endows them with history. They feel worn and corroded in a manner that more embellishment would have polished away.

The subjects of Kent’s paintings are threaded into a complex three-point perspectival framework, matrices that seem to trace invisible patterns: the electrical grid, microwaves, radio transmissions, or, in the case of Isotopia, radioactive particles leftover from atomic testing. Yet, these forces unseen are figuratively present in Kent’s bold paint lines. He has left the indentation of rulers and tape, which act like sizzling wires, and paint splatters, which spark and fly off the frame.

The grid structures themselves are colorless. Or, rather, they adopt the color of whatever is around them. This is no doubt because they have no physical reality. We can see them, but the figures in the pictures cannot lean on them. There is no solid scaffolding, only void. The cloaked walker in Stored Memory is a rare figure who is grounded in the landscape. However, ringed in blurry, monochromatic static, she feels like an apparition from the past. You don’t trust that she’s actually there. And then you begin to distrust the blue landscape around her, as if everything might be a projection.

The particular species of desaturated ultramarine in Stored Memory is related to what Rebecca Solnit calls “the blue of distance.” Beginning art students learn to use this color to carve out deep space in their paintings. Yet, this blue that should sit all the way back in the traveler’s imagination becomes just one more component in Kent’s matrix. The Phthalo blue-greens beat electric behind it in Stored Memory and in Data Lake and Order Types. They glow from underneath like the operating system itself.

Colored light doesn’t warm or cool the figures in Kent’s paintings. The segments of bodies, screens, and landscape in Order Types, for instance, don’t affect one another because they are not really in the same place so much as dialed in separately. This disjunction of color, paired with large areas of monochrome, leaves the paintings to be governed by their value structures. They often feel black and white with a high chroma overlay, like early hand-colored film.

A great strength of these paintings is their vast depth of field and playful spatial structure. The eye delights in lowering itself into the scaffolding and seeing how far back it can go. In descending these layered planes, we wonder, how frightened should we be? Perhaps we are in a video game, with fake stakes and nine lives. Data Lake certainly suggests a half-built virtual reality, with its hyper-saturated palette, disjoined forms, and still half exposed digital bone structure. But it has none of the clunky surrealism of computer graphics. And the figures in Order Types and Schism are fleshy. The ground, when it appears in Kent’s paintings, is earthy, organic.

Are they futurescapes then, the fanciful equivalent of a doomsayer’s sign? Guarding against that is their relationship to painting history. The weightiness of the figures suggests grandfathers in German Expressionist painting. The disjointedness suggests fathers in Neo Rauch or the Leipzig school. Data Lake reads as a spawn of Hudson River School painting. In fact, many of the works have roots in American history, with sources including John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence and a Washington press image of John F. Kennedy. These usher in a creeping sense of the familiar. The work materializes as more mirror than invention.

The figures in Order Types gather around empty treatises, wringing and clapping their blood clot hands. Caught between the human – the imminent rot of those fleshy protrusions from suits – and the floorless web, vertigo sets in. Kent offers no escape: no solid footing, no brighter character to choose, no space outside the grid. Rather, the paintings give us a chance to feel the awesome weight of the systems, often invisible, that implicate and imprison us, intricate structures built with our sliced and severed parts.

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May 4 to 28, 2017
21 Ludlow Street, between Canal and Hester streets
New York City, centralbookingnyc.com

In Greg Lindquist’s paintings and wall mural, a mixture of coal ash and water—pictured as an immiscible swirl—serves as an avatar for a 2014 coal ash spill that contaminated drinking water in North Carolina and Virginia. Lindquist has addressed this particular spill previously, in exhibitions at the North Carolina Museum of Art and again at The Southeastern Center for Community Change. Those two venues reflect strains of his thought (fine art, social action) that his installations attempt to conjoin.

The Library (curated by Diana Wege)  is a subsection of Central Booking, an amalgam venue that is part-bookstore, part-gallery. Lindquist is doing a lot within it. He has placed his oil paintings on two walls of a large, acrylic mural; the color-separated layers of its “swirl” image give it a graphic, digital effect. On the floor, Plexiglass vitrines of evidential coal ash follow the edge of the wall. An extensive booklet contextualizes the exhibition with interviews, essays by Lindquist and others, documentation of earlier exhibitions, a family history. Be warned, this is an exhibition with a lengthy backstory.

And yet, his paintings are not props by any means. Lindquist paints from projected photographs of the Dan River and Sutton Lake, two sites exposed to arsenic, cadmium, selenium and other pollutants. He’s attentive to the enlarged source images’ pixilation, which he renders here in Monet-like dabs. The colors look blown out and at times inverted, Fauvist for the end-days. According to Lindquist, the greenish color that underlies both mural and oil paintings is a Benjamin Moore finish, “Fresh Cut Grass.” “Toxic” is how previous viewers have described it, he tells me, and I can see why. It gives the paintings a hazy, eerie light. But he is thoughtful, troubled by the premise. “Part of the problem is that we don’t always know what toxic looks like. What is toxic?”

When I meet him, Lindquist is bussing a used tub of paint out to his car, saying he’d just completed the final touches the night before. These late decisions are idiosyncratic—including the low height of the exhibition’s smallest painting; the paper mâché covering a doorknob in the middle of his mural— that make the exhibition feel personal, inhabited. The coal ash vitrines along the floor reference Smithson’s “nonsite,” nature dislocated into the gallery. There is a corrective aspect to this gesture: dislocation is not simply a function of “aesthetic decisions,” as he writes of Land Art in a letter to Smithson in the exhibition booklet, but also political.

“Installation Art” is a short hand way of describing the method by which Lindquist brings his art into contact with environmental politics. I thought of the artist Sharon Hayes, who bends formats of protest, of assembly, toward a poetic-political art. I thought of Thomas Hirschhorn; an earlier iteration of “Smoke and Water” recalls Hirschhorn’s “Gramsci Monument,” inviting community participation. When I bring this up, Lindquist makes a distinction between paid workers and volunteer contributors. That Hirschhorn paid participants in the making of “Gramsci Monument” makes him uncomfortable (although “volunteer” is a fine line from “unpaid laborer,” hardly more ethical than paid labor).

Another, crucial difference is that Hirschhorn lives within the (Kurt Schwitters) Merzbau, collage-logic being the way much installation art has reconciled the conjunction of difficult parts. Lindquist has little merz to him. Nor does he share Hirschhorn’s ra-ra-ra mantra of “energy yes, quality no.” His work errs the other way: one is called in for meditation, or a quiet chat on a serious subject. “Smoke and Water” is admirably un-sensational, which may have less to do with artistic precedent than with Lindquist’s commitment to his subject and a refreshingly sincere conviction in art’s ability to affect social change.

Whether this is compatible with painting is an open question. It’s a premise of his work and a dare. Other disciplines than painting, particularly photography, sculpture, drawing, and video, have adapted with greater success to the Installation format. Painting does not play nicely with others; is not easily assimilated. When it’s simply a sign, it withers. But Lindquist’s paintings are adamantly complex. The most delicate is a small 8” x 10” painting of a coal ash “swirl” made with oil and glass bead. Look for it within the mural–its subtle placement took me close to ten minutes to notice it. The larger paintings are more challenging than beautiful, but full of the kinds of labored decisions that make his use of the space specific. He is a painter who leaves open the possibility of a discovery in paint, a chance encounter. The promise and challenge of Lindquist’s exhibition is the mixture of difficult, maybe impossible parts.

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When Jackie Brookner, the pioneering ecological artist, died of cancer earlier this year she was in the middle of The Fargo Project, which had just received an Art America grant for community-designed, “creative place-making” projects. The city of Fargo, ND will now implement the plan Brookner devised in collaboration with over a hundred people during five years.   The 18-acre storm water basin site surrounded by city neighborhoods will function as both restored wetland and neighborhood commons, with “passive” features such as a “listening garden” shaped like an ear; a citizen science lab; and giant, playable marimbas built out of tree logs. In a TEDx talk about the project Jackie said, “And it’s gotta be great in the winter, too, because as we know, it’s Fargo, right?… [New trees will] “shape the snow as the wind blows the snow over the trees.”

Brookner was a sculptor who made her interest in biology, social equality and her commitment to ecology all come together. As she wrote in 2009:

My practice as an ecological artist evolved over time and continues to evolve. I went to college sure I was going to be a biologist, but end up going into art history. Just before writing my PhD dissertation I started sculpting. it took about 20 years and several transformations to realize I could bring everything I loved together, catalyzed by building a cabin in the Adirondack woods (1985) and editing an issue of Art Journal on Art and Ecology (1990-92). Then I knew I needed to create work that would have beneficial ecological functions…I realized my work could be “of “ nature, rather than “about” it.

When I first knew Jackie I asked her to come to my studio. I was a young sculptor and wanted feedback on a body of work I was worrying about from this older, accomplished sculptor whose work I admired. She looked at my human-scale, painted plywood constructions and said, “These are very intelligent and very well-done but there’s something missing in this work. Where are you in this?” I was disappointed with her response. I thought maybe the work wasn’t good or maybe she just didn’t get it. In any case I had gotten no ideas about what to do next. Yet later, when I was beginning a new body of work, I started searching myself in a different way about my decisions. Was I seeking ideas for making Good Art or was I working from something authentic, for better or worse? Where was I in this, and what did that mean?

I continue to ask that question in my studio and in other areas of my life. I was organizing an exhibition of artists that included Jackie when she died. Titled “Climate Contemporary,” the show consisted of art dealing with the theme of climate change. As much as calling attention to the climate crisis the show was intended to examine artists’ varying relationships with content. How do you convey something about this notoriously difficult subject of global warming? What do you believe? What do you understand? “Where are you in this?” is a question of conscience and politics, as well as a question of truth and beauty, of making and ideas.

Jackie and I had several conversations about the show, which took place at the Lake George Arts Project in upstate New York where she and I both have spent summers. She urged me to focus on her more recent projects, Fargo and Veden Taika , saying “I didn’t want to put more stuff into the world” she instead created environmental works that consisted mainly of water, flora and fauna. The latter project (“The Magic of Water” in Finnish) is a decommissioned sewage lagoon surrounded by forest in Saalo for which Jackie mobilized local artists and students to build three floating islands. Constructed as fractal networks of linked triangles, the islands are platforms for plants that clean water and air, as well as provide habitat for nesting birds. When she discovered that animals were eating the eggs and hatchlings, Jackie led a team in building sculptures designed to enable birds to build nests high enough to elude marauders. Eventually the site became an EU bird sanctuary. Visually, the islands and sculptures appear both at home in their natural environment and human-made. They do not impersonate nature like dioramas at a natural history museum. In warm months a mechanism periodically produces a cloud of moisture which stimulates the plants’ microbial action that cleanses pollutants in the water. The effect (which I’ve seen only in photos) is mysterious and beautiful. In her TedX talk Jackie called it as “a misting sculpture”.

Jackie Brookner was the only artist in “Climate Contemporary” whose work actually embodies a solution to the problem it is referencing – not a global one, obviously, but a solution to the local weather event of storm water, one of the phenomena most clearly linked to climate change. She spoke of “the inseparability between our bodies and the habitats that support our lives” and held that sculpture could be mobilized to change people’s minds because it unleashed the power of metaphor. She wrote, “I can think of no task more urgent for our survival as a species because anything we do, any technology we come up with, is dependent on who we think we are”.

I didn’t know Jackie very well but I knew her for a long time. We got together, sometimes by chance, at crucial points in our lives. Toward the end of hers, she wanted to have time to make art in her studio and “enjoy the nature I have worked so hard to protect”. Her courage and personal integrity were evident in the honesty with which she spoke of her condition, and the prospects for her having more time. She could say “how much work our plant friends do for us” and make the words sound true. Many people are very sad not to have Jackie in our neighborhood any more, but we have so much that is important because of her. Myself, I will always have that question.

Memorial info

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