March 24 to May 1, 2016
143b Orchard Street (between Delancey and Rivington)
New York, 212 533 4670

In their two-person installation at Louis B. James Matthew and Katy Fischer have created pieces that evoke another time and place, one that does not and cannot exist. While Matthew’s paintings attempt to capture the complexity of an impossible environment in representation, Katy’s ceramics suggest a whole that is not real. These are works that aggregate, excavate, and re-collect the indifferent details of today and yesterday, and that also re-imagine them in a playful and inventive disorientation.

Functioning as vibrant windows, the bright, unadulterated colors of Matthew’s paintings are points of natural illumination in the austere whiteness of the gallery. In canvases suffused with swiftly applied swaths, atmosphere is communicated in simplicity. The linear division between two blocks of paint serves to illustrate a horizon and convey the sensorial saturation of a landscape. These abstract compositions are ambiguous cross-sections of the natural world in which our perspective is never made clear; viewers are left with the uncertainty of whether we are in it or on it, above it or below it. Nothing can be as it should, as you expect it, in a representation of landscape where the horizon is made vertical.

The artist exploits the spatial coding of found materials to disrupt the comfortable aloofness of the gallery space. Paris, 1907 (2015) engages viewers corporeally by pressing a chair seat, the place meant to hold a body, against the wall, as one’s actual, upright flesh exists as floor in relation to the chair’s legs. A painted canvas is suspended from the bottom limbs, presenting a slanting line between straw-yellow and a cool brown. A window onto a sloping hill? Turned earth? An abstract painting? Self (knowledge) and for Cathy (both 2016) provide a more generous contrast to the sense of inversion created by Paris, 1907, opening onto the viewer in a way that evokes action; spines of books prompt one to read, a mirror presents the opportunity to view the work and the gallery from a position otherwise impossible. Altogether, these painted structures are simultaneously spacious and claustrophobic, engaging a viewer’s physical presence while subtly dominating the gallery’s limited space. Rather than existing as an oppressive force, however, these sculptural works present fragmented images, flattened awkwardly into a confusion of fleeting sensations and orientations.

While Matthew’s paintings recode the gallery in relation to a viewer’s body, Katy’s ceramics discourage interaction. Although painstaking in their idiosyncrasy and handmade precision, these miniature works resist the viewer’s temptation to slip them easily into a pocket or to handle them absentmindedly between thumb and forefinger. The components of the Shards (2016) series demand care and attention for their own preservation but also for yours; implications of intimacy are interrupted by fine points and rigid forms. Arranged in systems that are suggestive of an order that is not revealed, these various pieces come together as a puzzle that lacks direct correspondence.

Katy’s ceramic compositions layer the unexceptional relics of daily life with the overbearing operations of exhibition.The fragments, some recognizable, others invented, are a confusion of scale in which figures reminiscent of a miniature traffic cone and a scaled-down scythe are placed beside those of a solitary die, a fishing hook and a screw. In spite of their familiarity, these recognizable pieces are given no pride of place above the unrecognizable geometric slivers and chips that cluster in the spaces between. These ceramic objects adhere to the logics of sea glass and arrowheads, serving a purpose that has since been forgotten or made obsolete. Presented in rows on pedestals or on a wood-and-Plexi vitrine — in manners particular to museums with their attendant overtones of classification and determination — the ceramic components seek to preserve that which is not precious. There is a certain illogic to creating objects that are never meant to be complete, especially ones such as these that seem to memorialize the litter of contemporary urban spaces in a medium that could endure for centuries.

In both bodies, the mode of presentation comes as a point of rupture rather than stability in the relationship between the works and the space that they occupy. In suggestive symbolism and their rootedness elsewhere, these ceramics and paintings fit uncomfortably in the gallery, drawing attention to the unreality and emptiness of such a space. In the awkwardness of their occupation, these works provide the viewer with an escape route into the impossible space that they themselves are dreaming of.

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In the brief interview with painter Peter Gallo that forms the catalog text of her solo exhibition at Louis B. James Gallery, Nora Griffin defines modernism in quirky, poetic terms that befit her winningly idiosyncratic compositions. “I think of modernism as a sensibility that conjoins the emotional inner world to the world of culture,” she says, and goes on to argue that abstraction “was invented to give form to this new sensibility.” It is a “look” that she finds in the eyes of Manet’s portrait of Berthe Morisot. Androgynized transcriptions of Manet faces pop up with some frequency around the show, sunk amidst provisionally executed yet art historically informed stylized grounds. Her paintings feel strangely poised between studio wall notations or scrapbook entries, on the one hand, and big statements about gesture, field and color, on the other. An attitude of studied nonchalance pervades, a throwaway formalism, a hard-won lightness of spirit.

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The exhibition “Rear Window Treatment,” currently at Louis B. James Gallery, is a group show that explores the concept of voyeurism, and by extension, implicates the viewer in voyeuristic acts as well. While it is traditionally considered a shameful thing to be a voyeur, the six artists in this show are unabashed in their representation of voyeuristic perspectives, exposing the extent to which the desiring gaze has come to inform contemporary sexuality and interpersonal perception in general. These are artists who like to look.

The star of the show is Betty Tompkins, who in recent decades has met with belated critical acclaim for her “Fuck Paintings”: large-scale reproductions of pornographic close-ups, usually depicting heterosexual penetration. Scandalous at the time of their debut in 1969, her paintings have garnered more and more attention over the years. Whether this is due to a gradual acceptance of women artists into the canon or a gradual decrease in American prudishness is open to debate.

Tompkins’s paintings aren’t on display here, rather, a group of small studies in ink on paper and photographs. Created between 2012 and 2014, these six drawings are more reserved than her photorealistic paintings in that the explicit content has been drawn (or drawn over) with loosely quivering scribbles of ink. Some of the scribblier works depicting vaginas, such as Photo Drawing #7 (2013), begin to approach a transcendental level of abstraction. Other works, such as Photo Drawing #3 (2012), with its highly explicit depiction of double penetration, are more in keeping with her original oeuvre while also incorporating the expressionistic scribbles to pleasing effect.

Other artists in the show invite us to look at porn, and invite us to touch it too. Michael Mahalchick’s Acid Rain (2014) consists of cardboard DVD covers from porno films, folded together so as to create a “crude” un-bound book that sits on a shelf. Visitors are welcome to flip through it, although they might not want to, as the covers have a used look about them. The absence of actual DVDs hints at the hollowness of pornographic consumption, wherein the object of desire is inevitably elsewhere. The DVD covers feel anachronistic when considered in relation to Deric Carner’s interactive Tip If You Love Me (2014), a spidery black sculpture proffering touch-screen tablets streaming live-cam pornography. The structure resembles a mutant mic-stand carved out of wood, and the tablets are all tuned to the website chaturbate.com, each one showing a different sort of pornography. The wooden armature lends the installation an organic tactility that offsets the impersonality of the cyber-sex component, perhaps suggesting that digital voyeurism is a natural extension of human sexuality.

The title of the exhibition, “Rear Window Treatment,” is adapted from Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), in which Jimmy Stewart plays a newspaper photographer with a broken leg who passes his convalescence by watching his neighbors from the window of his apartment. Barb Choit, a Vancouver-based photographer, mimics this scenario by presenting photographs of her neighbors going about their daily affairs. The pictures are simply exquisite: taken under low light, the colors are rich and saturated, and the framing device of the window lends them extra drama. The scenes hover between the banal and the touching, such as a cheesy kiss on television glimpsed through a neighbor’s drapes. In another, a beautiful woman brushes her hair behind slatted blinds. The photographs are so loaded with untold stories that they feel like film stills.

The exhibition’s only film work, William E. Jones’s Mansfield 1962 (2006), consists of edited archival footage taken by the police through a two-way mirror in a public bathroom during a gay sex sting operation in 1962. Many of the men in the video were prosecuted under sodomy laws, a chilling reminder of the restrictions on gay rights less than 50 years ago. Back then, state-of-the-art visual technologies were being used to out gay people; today, the latest visual technologies are being used for things such as chaturbate.org.

Finally, Brad Phillips pays homage to the legendary Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý with a series of watercolors based on Polaroids that Phillips took of women in New York City. Tichý (1926 – 2011) was often mistaken for a crazy person with a fake camera because of his sketchy appearance and his homemade cameras constructed from cardboard tubes with hand-ground lenses. He almost exclusively photographed women in public, which eventually got him banned from the local swimming pool in his hometown of Kyjov. The four watercolors by Phillips are each titled Your Miroslav Tichý (all 2014), and they emulate Tichý’s style by depicting sexy women’s legs with all else cropped from the frame. However, the conceptual connection ends there, since Phillips’ watercolors lack the dream-like soft focus that makes Tichý’s photographs so magical. There is a clean quality about Phillips’s work that betrays the fact that he is not an inveterate voyeur like Tichý, although he may aspire to be.

The exhibition raises questions about the morality of spying on people for one’s own pleasure, but most of these artists appear to be in favor of the practice. The exception might be Jones, whose work reads as a condemnation of police surveillance and discrimination. Nevertheless, even Jones’s video carries an element of voyeuristicdétournement in that the source footage has been repurposed for our pleasure and edification. We want to see everything (especially sex) and the evolution of visual technology is being employed towards that end. Mahalchick’s empty DVD sleeves remind us that the voyeuristic gaze can be an unfulfilling substitute for a physical human connection, but if you like to look, rest assured you are not alone.

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