January 10 to February 16, 2019
545 West 25th Street
New York City, marlboroughcontemporary.com

Davina Semo’s solo exhibition at Marlborough Contemporary, “ALL THE WORLD,” her third there, marks a shift in tone from her previous work. Although the basic constituents of her sculptures remain much the same—industrial materials, fasti craft, appropriated texts used as all-caps titles—themes of control, eroticism, and violence have been tempered. Expressions of emotion and affection have swelled, and while those elements predate this show, they are given added, moving emphasis.

The show is built around two bodies of work: cast-bronze bells and brightly colored acrylic mirrors, all dated 2019. Three early bells were shown by Semo in Marlborough’s upstairs space in the winter of 2016 and 2017, and at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery in late 2017, though those were smaller and had other differences in their facture and hanging. Semo’s use of mirrors goes back to at least 2010, though those pieces often utilized obscuration as a tactic. Rather than those previous black or silver glass mirrors, these are bright pink, yellow, turquoise, reminiscent of mirrors by Sherrie Levine.

The five mirrors, each six-by-five feet, are embedded with two sets of radial ball bearings in overlapping constellations. One set of ball bearings is arranged in a grid; the other set is dispersed across the surface in spay-like disarray, recalling a backpack by Semo that has been repeatedly shot, shown at Marlborough in 2015. The mirrors capture, in subtly warped faces, the reflection of viewers and the bells. This is a lovely curatorial trick, reiterating and altering the perception of the work and the space. And the ball bearings take on multiple readings: the fearlessness of skateboards (they’re a part of the wheel system), the suggestion of mass anxiety signified by fidget spinners (they’re also a component of those toys), or, evading that dichotomy altogether, the cold reliability of machinery. Such allusions play up or run against the titles, which vary between grim and hopeful.

Semo’s bells, ranging from 20 to 33 inches tall, are made with a wax-casting technique that results in a bullet-shaped dome with eroded-looking rifts and drips on their thick walls. They’re tall and thin, patinated with a bituminous-colored finish and hung with chains that are powder-coated glossy black. Inside each is a wooden clapper attached to a thick, woven nylon rope. Visitors are encouraged to ring the clapper, but not touch the bronze, which, despite its robust appearance, has a very delicate patina. Each is attached at the ceiling while appearing to be slung through an eye bolt and anchored (save for one) to large bales of recyclable detritus, including aluminum and electronics cables.

Semo addresses both global and local concerns in this work. Close to home, the mirror SHE BECAME VERY SENSITIVE TO THE TASTE OF WATER FROM THE TAP reads, in its blue surface and epidemiologic red and black ball bearings, as an allusion to the ongoing Flint water crisis. A pink mirror is similarly dire, called IN THE REGION WHERE HE LIVED THERE WERE NO PLANTS AT ALL. Most frighteningly and directly, a bell in the center of the gallery held by two massive, stacked bales is called “BECAUSE WE ARE FACING AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT AND THERE IS NO TIME TO CONTINUE DOWN THIS ROAD OF MADNESS,” SHE SAID, a quote from 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (Part of the horror here is the scale: those enormous bales were selected from among God only knows how many others, impressing on viewers a fraction of the resources used and wasted by people, which is an existential crisis.) Another bell, nearer to the entrance, is titled “IT IS HARD,” SHE SAID, “TO IMAGINE THE WORLD AS IT WAS”.

The anchoring bale of that latter piece includes reptilian-looking metal scraps that resemble works in Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s show of erotic and mystical sculptures in Marlborough’s viewing room, called “Towards an End to Biological Perception,” organized by Leo Fitzpatrick. The crushed aluminum, in places, looks like the snake-skin dominatrix shoe in P-Orridge’s Shoe Horn #9 (2016). There are echoes, too, between Semo’s work and P-Orridge’s use of snake fetishes made of curled iron, scaly dessicated fishes, or, for example, the mirrors in No Mercy (2019).

The one bell not attached to a bale is instead connected to a slab of rolled steel, with the words “ALL THE WORLD” (the work’s title) embossed on it in welded block letters. Bells serve for warning and mourning. Lament and alarm for the world as it is or was runs through several of the sculptures, ringing with the kind of sentiment found in John Donne’s famous “No Man is an Island,” apt for the moment in all sorts of ways, including the analogizing of coastal erosion and human suffering on both grand and individual scales:

No man is an island
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Mourning and heartache are, almost certainly, impossible without the kind of compassion and love Donne expresses. Despite the distress found in works here, the exhibition is nonetheless suffused with love and reassurance—something like courage and hope when held against existential threat. A bell closest to the entrance is reassuringly titled SHE CAN SQUEEZE HIS HAND WHEN PEOPLE ASK HER QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE. A mirror is called SHE LOOKED UP AT HIM, DIRECTLY, WITH TOTAL ATTENTION.

Bells also ring for celebration and contemplation. Among the people I saw tolling them, one of the gallery’s preparators was rolling the clapper gently around the lip of the bell, like a meditative singing bowl, making it hum. It’s hard to know how to address the beautiful and the horrible on Earth side by side, except perhaps to face what is awful, and to cultivate what is not.

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January 7 to February 22, 2014

381 Broadway, 2nd Floor, between White and Walker Street
New York, info@nationalexemplar.com
Hours: Thursday to Sunday, 2-7pm

Compared to words, pictures are the more enigmatic, imprecise mode of expression; consequently, words are (as demonstrated here) often employed to describe and organize interpretations for images. Leo Fitzpatrick, however, attempts to conduct the reverse by subtly motivating the act of painting to service words. His fascinating solo show at the National Exemplar Gallery is comprised of a quiet ring of monochromatic text paintings of uniform, modest scale that outline the rim of the gallery’s space. Black capital letters are painted in the most nondescript, precisely medium-strength sans serif font. One corner of the room feels momentarily warped by five standout canvases set against darker and hazier backgrounds, but most titles come as suites of two or three canvases. The installation does not immediately clarify these groupings or suggest an agreed upon starting point to viewing the work.

The thirty-six year old artist first gained attention as a teenage skateboarder in Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). In addition to his paintings he is also known for his ardent word collages made with old paperback novels, found images, and other cultural debris. He has also published several volumes of poetry, mostly pages of restless, probing free verse lines quite similar to text found in these poem paintings: “a collection of sad hopes and futures dying / a destiny fit for a king.” “MY ANGER IS MY HOME (THE BOY WHO COULD MAKE HIMSELF DISAPPEAR) AND I’M HOME ALONE.” Compared to other artists who work with words such as Christopher Wool, Carl Andre or Jamie Shovlin, Fitzpatrick’s collaboration with language is curiously literal and reverent. These canvases are too large to fit household printers, but the increased typeface retains the proportional familiarity and intimacy of 12 point Arial on A4 paper. Each canvas contains a sparse handful of words, displayed in aesthetically reasonable compositions that are not overdesigned. Lines are never robotically centered or justified, and words are only severed after prefixes and never interrupted mid-syllable. The result is a group of effortlessly truthful still-life portraits of poetry in its essential state.

Painting’s accessible, lyrical physicality does not engulf language’s abstract identity; the verses gain the perfect degree of hyper-articulated visibility without having to materialize their contents as reinterpreted, disenchanting illustrations. Sourced from poems and diaries that Fitzpatrick has been keeping since age eight, these paintings awaken distant feelings that are invisible yet intensely palpable. Memories of unresolved poignancy and angst have long been archived as experience, and the paintbrush fully reactivates their sting. The blunt, black brushstrokes come through like deep trenches and dig into plush layers of white and wintry grays, putting to bed buzzing palimpsests of revised dreams and nostalgia.

One of the most mesmerizing moments in the show is a series of three canvases that begins with “NEVER AGAIN” and ends with “AGAIN.” “NEVER AGAIN” is positioned at the top of the left panel and “AGAIN” at the bottom of the right, conversing like two clearly adjacent pieces in a complex puzzle set. The center canvas reads, “I WAS/IN LOVE/WITH YOU/INTILL YOU/LEFT WITH/HIM.” Intentional or not, Fitzpatrick’s misspellings are immensely engrossing. There is something sinister about the word “intill” that makes it stick and linger – perhaps it is due to the unexpected absence of the friendly roundedness of the shape of “U”? After a lengthy gaze, the brigade of vertical strips here will begin to appear dangerously sharp and spear-like. A delicate frenzy of cracks and wrinkles on the finely shattered surrounding surface confirms their weight.

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May 10 to June 22, 2012
511 West 25th Street, Suite  307, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-343-2468

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Leo Rabkin’s enchanting retrospective, spanning five of his nine decades (he was born in 1919),  includes a range of  work, although the vision is all of a piece.  What he demonstrates – something too rarely seen – is the ingenious, thoughtful, even tender transformation of ordinary materials into marvelous inventions. And marvel the viewer does.  Rabkin’s often modestly-scaled assemblages (there are exquisite works as small as 3¾ by 5¾ inches) comprise reliefs, boxes, works on paper, and collages.  They combine all manner of media: threads, metal, string, cords, beads, buttons, tiny nacre seashells, canvas, and myriad papers.  His papers are stained, inked, plaited, folded, frayed, suspended, and flocked.   Captivating and elegant, produced with the simplest, readily available materials, his works are undergirded by a refined structural sensibility, an acute but never insistent sense of measure, proportion, and color.  Strong organizing principles notwithstanding, the magic (an overused but apt term here) of these works may have something to do with a seeming offhandedness in their ad hoc presentation.  Onlookers are also transformed as we are made to consider or reconsider what we may routinely overlook—how shapes vary; elemental differences among materials, their properties and surfaces; and the possibilities of making whole fascinating little worlds by attentively concocting, composing, and (a great American tradition) tinkering with them..

In this last respect, Rabkin’s inventive assemblages recall Alexander Calder’s objects.  They too defy conventional terms like sculpture—their ingenuity bolstered by their unpretentiousness.  Rabkin’s works are visual poems: succinct and subtle.. Part of their appeal is surely the unprepossessing nature of his chosen materials, which are neither costly nor complicated.  He reinstates what may be deemed déclassé materials—rhinestones, goggle eyes, and flocking—and excites a reappraisal and appreciation for their glitter and curiosity.  We are drawn to appreciate the stitched dashes of silken red thread on fragile, slightly yellowed paper, or, in an untitled work from around 2011, the minuscule hairy filaments of flocking, used to achieve delicately lush, textured surfaces. A series of small white tissue-thin squares of fine folded paper, dated from around 2005, float on tiny tightropes through space, and are mirrored.  Once again, the simplest of objects are artfully made, leaving the viewer to wonder at just how stupendous light, air, weightlessness, and reflections can be.

Rabkin’s works share an affinity with the American folk and outsider art that he and his late wife long collected and which captivates him still.  Like them, the objects and images demonstrate how, with unremitting resourcefulness, immensity can result from little.  Whirligigs, weather vanes, game boards, postal sorting cubbies, whittled and painted figures, and a host of other doodads demonstrate how with unremitting resourcefulness, immensity can result from little.  That is a quality that he continues to develop.  Whether reflected in things he makes or collected, Rabkin stands in opposition to the slick, highly professionalized and manufactured aesthetic that has come to appeal to the mega pocketbooks of the art world today.

Rabkin makes frequent use of small boxes.  These boxed enclosures have a family resemblance to those of Joseph Cornell–though Rabkin’s small worlds are not hermetically sealed.  Like Cornell, Rabkin, with his lyrical imagination, creates intimate cosmologies.  His quiet little treasure chests (many found and recycled), like gifts or offerings, present the prospect of discovery, surprise, and wonder.  Plain on the outside, sometimes stenciled or finished with combed or delicately striated surfaces, even mysterious when closed, these containers may be opened to display a small theater of unexpected elements.  Part of their appeal is the special aura they emit through the carefully constructed transmogrification of materials: so beads strung in channels are mimicked and continued in drawn lines and glittery small beads glued against a dark panel become a celestial firmament Their order reminds us of Georges Santayana’s ruminations about the organization of the stars in the nighttime sky.

Rabkin studied art at New York University under Tony Smith, but his training did not channel his work into a self-consciously high art mode. The Luise Ross Gallery, where he buoyantly received admirers at his opening,  had its foundations in representing artists not formally trained—Bill Traylor for example (an artist whom Rabkin collected).  For many years he taught disturbed adolescents in the New York city schools, and devoted himself to his art only in the last several decades.  It may not, however, be a stretch to understand his unremitting glorification of the most elemental objects as part of a more general appreciation of what is there, good, and not to be taken for granted.

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