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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July 1 to August 8, 2015
106 N 1st Street (at Berry Street)
Brooklyn, 718 218 7148

It may be true that God is dead. We find ourselves in a time and place where we’ve been freed from contextual restraints in our expression. As Friedrich Nietzsche described the nature of morality, rejecting an objective truth in favor of the subjective decision to determine what is good, evil, and everything in between, the god figure, or master, has become obsolete, the power of ateliers is faded, and overarching movements have become unrecognizable. Although the task of creating art may be daunting when facing the abyss of ever-developing ideas and technologies, it is not at all impossible to generate meaning. And that is what “Freedom Culture,” curated by Graham Collins, is about. Featuring the work of nearly 40 artists, this exhibition, held at Williamsburg’s Journal Gallery, ties together an array of styles, media, and ideas, which result in an equivocal yet solid statement about present culture.

It raises the question of how we navigate the ambiguity of freedom in our decision making process without an objective aesthetic-moral-contextual-etc. compass to guide the way. Collins tackles this issue by blurring the line between many categories: literal and figurative, painting and sculpture, as well as object and illusion. Brent Holland Baker’s text painting, Untitled (2015) — with the words “SMALL PARADISE AND BIG BIG HELL” arranged from top to bottom on a textured, alizarin crimson ground — offers an explicit statement with an open-ended meaning encapsulated by a specific aesthetic experience. It is hung next to an Ida Ekblad piece, Not Titled (2015), in which collaged drawings allude to an abstract world where plasticity and flatness interact with each other. In another room, Elizabeth Murray’s playful, colorful shaped-canvas painting, Truth, Justice, and Comics #1 (1990), finds a foil in Elizabeth Jaeger’s handsome and serious sculptures made of steel, ceramic, maple, and granite.

The seemingly incongruous set of ideas present in this grouping speaks to the nature of finding meaning. Without over-determined meanings, the individual is solely responsible for her own experience and interpretation of the work at hand. Oftentimes, the process of coming to a decision isn’t so simple as landing on one side of a dichotomy, making freedom a little frustrating or even frighteningly unknown. Collins doesn’t just want you to wonder if whether Baker’s piece is a painting or mere text; by placing it next Ekblad’s collage, in a room separated from Murray and Jaeger’s work, we see that freedom is a subjective, metastatic interpretation.

There is no formula, but somehow every work in the show communicates with the space as a whole, while maintaining its autonomy. Inadvertently, this addresses the cultural obsession with individuality and the pervasive need to assert one’s uniqueness. We do all sorts of things to maintain such distinction: hair dye, brand-name fashions, customized sneakers and phones. The collection of unique entities in this show can be read as a metaphor for the variety show we participate in every day. Simply choosing to assert ourselves is what makes life unique and meaningful.

Collins has created a matrix of two-dimensional work and sculpture for the viewer to navigate on their own terms. The entire gallery is activated so that one cannot consume any single piece without sensing another in the periphery. A stark conceptual piece living in the front of the gallery, Oyster Split (pets and cops) (2015), by Andy Meerow, consists of the words “pets” and “cops” printed, respectively, on two white canvases. Its austere presence pushes the viewer to the mysterious photographs — containing ephemeral, in some cases dark imagery, Such as Sam Moyer’s Willie III, (2009) which portrays an obscured figure bathed in complete darkness — hanging in the back room, before being pulled back into the center of the gallery where most of the action is. A viewer can go from thinking about politics, to aesthetics, to philosophy, to what was for lunch as she wanders among the work. Like an ant, the viewer’s physical and mental path resembles the show’s five untitled drawings by David Adamo, which look like they were made by following the path of a tiny insect, becoming nests of indecipherable text.

In this space we sense our small, unique presence in an endless network of happenings. Though our freedom to go one way or another may be arbitrary, the way we communicate with each other in the process can be as meaningful as we make it.

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January 30 to March 14, 2015
63 Margaret Street (between Great Titchfield and Great Portland streets)
London, +44 20 7580 1480

Royal Academy-trained painter and independent curator Bella Easton lives and works in South London. She regularly exhibits her work while also co-directing a project space, a platform for invited artists to produce a site-specific work. Her current curatorial and ongoing offsite projects include: “Collateral Drawing,” “The Opinion Makers” and “A5, Athens.” She found time to take in ”The Presence of Absence” at the Berloni Gallery in London, a 14-artist exhibition curated by artcritical contributor Paul Carey-Kent, and to discuss the show with him.

BELLA EASTON: How did the show come about?

PAUL CAREY-KENT: As with the four previous shows I have curated recently, it stemmed from a gallery that I know fairly well asking if I’d like to put on a show. In this case, Berloni had two preferences: for a conceptually based group show and for a minimal proportion of painting, as they felt their existing and planned programmes were painting-heavy and they wanted a contrast.

What’s the idea behind of “The Presence of Absence”?

It’s often said that negative space is as important as positive shapes in a composition. The works in this show turn around a parallel feature of content, as opposed to form: namely, what is not present is at least as important as what is present — so a key role is played by the paradoxical-sounding “presence of absence” in work by 14 artists.

What were your influences leading to that idea?

Probably my background in philosophy: I like a good paradox, and have always been interested in how far you can push an approach in art — for example, how little can possibly be enough? My standard operation procedure as a curator is probably that I see a lot of shows — some 800 a year, of which I write on about 150, so I do have a wide spectrum of artists to choose from once I’ve fixed on a theme. My preference is not to have heavily intellectualised theory, but to look for something simple and thought-provoking that can connect choices together without pretending to exhaust them: there will always be more angles on the work of interesting artists, and so a show can develop its own complexity.

How did you decide what to put in the show?

Just before being asked to curated the show, I had seen a rough cut of Maria Marshall’s new video. She made a film in 2001 in which a boy kicks a ball against the wall of a church; only the ball has been digitally removed leaving only its sound and shadow. It is an attack on the church of sorts, albeit not too effective, with a subtext of how football might have become a new religion. Her new film (premiered in this exhibition) shows a ball bouncing around the dilapidated interior of a church in Georgia. This time it’s the person who has been edited out and the ball bounces menacingly around, looking likely to knock over iconic religious images set on a table — but never quite does. The idea of putting these two films together pushed me towards this particular project, out of the range I had in mind. I planned to mix film, sculpture and photography with a small amount of painting. I decided that a sound-only piece would be thematic; and Giorgio Sadotti proposed the scent installation, which I was happy to accept.

Who else is in the show?

Films by John Smith (The Black Tower, 1987) and Liane Lang (The Last Days, 2012-13) use buildings, outside and in, to animate our understanding of what we cannot see. Stefana McClure gives us the longest films — albeit, it could be said, without images or duration — through two of the drawings in which she traces their complete subtitles. A sound installation by Bronwen Buckeridge creates an illusory space in the midst of the gallery. Nika Neelova presents a sculpture that seems to stand in for another absent work, echoing Rachel Whiteread’s characteristic casting of the negative, seen in her Herringbone Floor (2001). Blue Curry’s found object groupings stand indirectly for people and for differing constructions of their self-images. Alan Magee fills in two hoops with plaster. Anni Leppälä and Jason Oddy exploit the uncanny ability of the photograph to freeze into permanence what is and isn’t there. Two painters complete the line-up: Martine Poppe’s images come and go as we circle round them, and Ian Bruce plays with the absence and presence of people in their surroundings.

What’s that smell?

That’s Sadotti’s Vatican (2015): he instructed that incense be burned at the gallery daily in order to evoke an absent place.

Is curating a creative medium or process for you and, if so, could it be suggested that the outcome of the curation is the presence of the absence of the curator?

I suppose it is creative, yes, though essentially I do it for enjoyment. It’s a nice thought that I was present during the show while absent; though I was present several times guiding people around.

Has there been an audience favorite?

It’s encouraging that one visitor or another has named each artist in the show as a particular favorite. That said, it’s probably fair to mention three artists as being especially popular. The remarkably persuasive spatial illusions created by the three minutes of binaural sound that make up Buckeridge’s Mid Eye Long High (2013) provoked such animated responses in the people listening that I was asked at the opening whether it was a performance piece! It also proved the biggest hit with child visitors. Artists tended to be struck by the simple elegance of Alan Magee’s Return to Glory (2014), in which filling two hula hoops with plaster makes quintessentially light toys into heavy sculptures, removing their function and presenting them as art. Of course there was nothing in the hoops originally, so I see this as an absence of absence itself. The two Maria Marshall films were also very popular.

If given the opportunity to expand on this theme as a larger exhibition, is there anything you would do differently and who else would you include?

I originally asked 18 artists, expecting that some would turn me down, and four did. Normally, one would not mention that, but here it seemed thematically apt to imagine them as present: John Stezaker, with a work from the Tabula Rasa series, wherein the removal of part of an image stands in for a screen and simultaneously implies the possibility of other presence. I’d wanted one of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s cinema photographs, which curiously parallel Stefana McClure’s arrival at something like a modernist monochrome through the act of transcribing subtitles to the point of indecipherability. Paul Pfeiffer wasn’t included, but he’s an artist best known for editing out parts of video footage to great effect. Finally, I wanted Mungo Thomson’s The Collected Live Recordings of Bob Dylan 1963-1995, a sound piece comprised only of applause recorded at Dylan’s concerts. That proves oddly addictive, and would, I believe, have been a fitting presence for those who did accept my invitation. Still, I’d like those four to accept second time around, and it would be good to have a more substantial presence from some of the other artists.

Did everything turn out as you expected?

Perhaps not as I expected, but certainly as I hoped. A number of relationships occurred that I had not anticipated. For example: Neelova and Magee echoed not only each other, but also the windows of the gallery’s upper space; and the way in which works covered for each other’s absences was picked up by visitors and critics, such as Rowena Hawkins, who reviewed the show for The Upcoming.

Were there any unexpected or unplanned “presence of absence” surprises that came out of the curation?

What I had anticipated least was how several works would turn out to reference a critical question of presence or absence: does God exist? Wherever you stand on that, there’s no denying the charge that it brings to the work of Lang, Marshall and Sadotti, and there’s also implications of a world beyond in Leppälä and Magee, an angel in Poppe’s painting and a cross to be read into one of Oddy’s photographs of the Pentagon, which shows a rebuilt room 18 months after the crash of Flight 77 destroyed it on September 11, 2001.

What future UK or international curatorial projects do you have lined up?

Curation is very much my third string after my day job and art writing, but I have two definite plans for the rest of this year: a group show themed around “weight” at London’s Maddox Arts in April, and a ten-artist Anglo-German project in Berlin in September, which presents works of art alongside the collateral residue of their production (an interesting theme, but it’s my co-curators, you and Iavor Lubomirov, who came up with it!). I’m also booked well ahead to present a group show of process-based abstract painting at Soho’s St. Barnabas club in 2017. Then there are several possibilities that are more speculative at this stage, including an IKEA-themed show, and two potential co-curations with artist friends Jane Harris and Sara Haq.

Thank you Paul for your very personal and informed incite into a truly exciting exhibition. I look forward to your future curations and working with you on Collateral Drawing Berlin, later this year.

For more details see: www.berlonigallery.com
paulsartworld.blogspot.com
http://www.collateraldrawing.org

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