April 15 to May 22, 2016
147 Roebling St, between Hope Street and Metropolitan Avenue
Brooklyn, 718 782 2556

In his 1984 essay titled “On the Manner of Addressing Clouds,” an attack on the Modernist ideal of originality, Thomas McEvilley asserts that “post-Modern quoting is simply a process of bringing out into the open what all modes of expression do all the time anyway, but without usually bothering to acknowledge (or even realize) it.” Never mind that Modernist originality had always been something of a straw man; at a time when appropriation was a cutting-edge practice among artists — and a decade or so before the flood of imagery that washes over us via easy access to the Web — this pictorial strategy was ripe for theorizing. At the time, McEvilley could have had no idea how pervasive an activity quotation would become. Indeed, by now the adjective “original” has largely been shelved in favor of more modest claims, such as “fresh” or “idiosyncratic,” often awarded to works that recombine pre-existing sets of signifiers.

New York painter Amy Hill has developed a convincing, personal voice within this context of rampant quotation. Her current exhibition, “Young and Innocent,” features 16 modern-dress productions, in oil on canvas or wood, of those very stagey and stiff nineteenth-century American folk portraits in which children pose with various defining attributes of childhood, yet seem always to look so much older than their years. Funny and frightening, the show is a disconcerting delight.

Chief among Hill’s sources are itinerant portrait painters such as Joseph Goodhue Chandler, whose super weird Frederick Eugene Bennet (n.d) is, apparently, something of a touchstone for Hill. Absently tugging his long suffering dog’s ear, the little sister — still too young for pants — wears a crisp blue dress and dainty black shoes; he holds a pink lily (for the Victorians, a symbol of chastity) in his left hand, at precisely genital height.

Hill refers to this unsettling work in at least three paintings, including Girl with Lego Dog in which the painting’s main subject, now female, wears a skirt of a similar blue with an animé-emblazoned t-shirt, red Converse All Stars, a New Orleans Pelicans cap and a forearmful of temporary tattoos; the lily has become an iPod, and the pooch is made entirely of Lego bricks. Hill retains — in fact, she amplifies — the leafy shrub that frames the figure, the carpet-like lawn, the bizarrely discontinuous distant landscape comprising a verdant hillside on the right and a gleaming lake on the left, and, most conspicuously, the child’s disproportionately large head and affectless expression.

In Hill’s Two Boys a pair of tattooed youths dressed in leather jackets crouch behind the underbrush with an open laptop and a potted marijuana plant; in the background towers a glass-and-steel cityscape. They regard the viewer with vague suspicion and defiance. The overall composition, as well as boys’ poses, posture, spatial relationship, and facial expressions, reprise Brothers, an 1845 canvas by Susan Catherine Moore Waters, in which the key props are a big straw hat and a flowering wild rose; the vista, a bucolic pastureland. Hill captures the understated eagerness of Waters’ sitters to demonstrate that they are old enough to direct their self-presentation.

Hill is known for her witty reworkings of Flemish and Netherlandish portrait paintings, which are carried by her impeccable technique, mordant humor and deadpan delivery. Interestingly, many of the same compositional and narrative devices are often in play. Whether the early Americans were quoting Northern Renaissance painters is a question for a specialist, but it seems entirely possible in light of the period’s Renaissance Revival. (Or maybe the two contexts are merely homologous, and the common proclivity, for example, for three-quarter views of the head has no greater significance than the fact that it is a timeless challenge to paint an ear.)

Branding is significant even where it is sparse, as in Girl with Skooter. Against a backdrop of a riverside mill building (shades of old New England?) a young lady in red and her little charcoal-gray terrier pose before the girl’s two-wheeler; her eyes closed, she is transported to a purely sonic realm by means of her iPod. Her Minnie Mouse shoes, together with her dog’s Chanel collar tag, send an intentionally broad-based message having something favorably to do with the empowerment of women—Minnie was a flapper, after all, and Coco a self-made multibillionaire. Such is the semaphore system of conspicuous logo display.

In the same essay, McEvilley claims, “Quoting is an inevitable component in all acts of communication; it is what makes communication possible.” The precision of that message depends in part on mutual understanding of the material quoted, and Hill’s subjects are fluent in the nuanced language of the corporate identity, the public image, the mission statement, the celebrity endorsement. They know what’s cool, what used to be cool, what might next become cool. They define themselves by association therewith, through a hybridity of self-branding, as did their counterparts of an earlier era by means of a different but equally transparent vocabulary of symbols. By quoting the quoters, Hill views with a gimlet eye McEvilley’s “vast image bank of world culture” even as she signs on to it.

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May 22 to June 21, 2015
147 Roebling Street (between Hope and Metropolitan)
Brooklyn, 718 782 2556

Long guided by a circumspect approach to unfurling his intuition, Peter Fox shows his vulnerability in the suite of paintings on display through June 21^st at the Front Room Gallery in Williamsburg. Since December last year, the artist has maintained white spaces on his canvases. The “blank” areas develop between the prodigiously varied effects he produces by extruding bundled stripes of semi-liquid, matte, acrylic paint, which are then left to slide partway down the clean surface. The melting ribbons of clear, bright color-groups represent hypothetical nations or advertise various emotional states. Owing to the addition of more water to thin the texture of the paint in the new works, the striped bands alternately shrink to thin vacillating lines or abruptly spread out like broad waving flags. Overall, the dripping striations look like spooky, alien forms of calligraphy and gestures from a private dance. The resulting erratic negative spaces sing the strange, knotted song of Fox’s new freedom.

These paintings are a far cry from the prior hypnotic, yet rigidly composed color spectrum paintings Fox produced in the same way, though with the use of a thicker gel medium that choked the paint’s flow. For the last decade Fox has centered his work on mastering a form of readymade technique: the drip. According to the artist, he perfected rendering the “world of the drip” after years of experimentation with a large, squeezable, syringe-like tool; Fox succeeded in becoming a virtuoso at controlling the chaos of oozing paint as he formed frozen showers of candy-colored drops. Without completely leaving behind his adherence to hands-off practices such as painting without touching a brush or letting his colors mix automatically inside a plastic tube, Fox takes a breath here and jumps into the open air. Rather than restrict himself to merely employing the physiology of the paint and its relation to gravity, he shows his hand, its gesture and the movement of his body. The results look like he is using a form of automatic application to indicate it’s harder not to acknowledge the range of emotions that come with risking direct, intimate contact.

The transitional nature of the artworks in “Blind Trust” may have left the show susceptible to old installation habits for the gallery and the artist. The density of paint and color in his prior pieces made them more self-contained: the context for each artwork had less impact on it’s viewing. The difference between the way the work is shown in the gallery’s two rooms points to the importance of fully recognizing its current porous identity which bridges beyond the edge of the stretcher. The first room in the show is dominated by a sampling of Fox’s fluid technique across small works presented in a large grid. This dense, regimented arrangement diminishes the thrill of the new responsiveness in Fox’s paintings and works against the hard-won stance of the show. The other structural clutter in the room — a display platform and reception desk — adds to the distraction. The spare installation of four larger paintings in the second, more cloistered room clarifies Fox’s broadened scope. The most gratifying piece in the show is also the largest: HERALDIC (2015), spanning over nine feet. It is the lone anchor of the space’s long far wall and mesmerizes with the possibilities of paint Fox has realized on its surface. The tailored installation in this room allows for a fuller appreciation of the extent to which the artist has revealed himself within the new body of work. In a final twist, however, the inevitable downward pull of the paint’s physical weight that Fox leaves unchecked across all the paintings in “Blind Trust” could be read as trumping his, or anyone’s, self-liberating strivings.

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