June Leaf: Recent Works at Edward Thorp Gallery
April 23 to June 13, 2015
210 11th Avenue #601 (at West 25th Street)
New York, 212 691 6565

Joan Semmel: Across Five Decades at Alexander Gray Associates
April 2 to May 21, 2015
510 West 26^th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 399 2636

The human body is incumbent in the work of artists June Leaf and Joan Semmel, who are subjects of recent shows in Chelsea at Edward Thorp Gallery and Alexander Gray Associates, respectively. Walking into “June Leaf: Recent Works” feels like stumbling upon a secret. Leaf, who has been practicing since the late 1940s, has frequently likened her working process to dance, and something of her physical body indeed feels present in the objects and paintings.

Much of the work included here examines the act of creation. As making anything is an individual experience for each person, perhaps it is not surprising that Leaf’s work puts vulnerability on open display. You can feel it as soon as you walk into the gallery, and are faced with Woman Drawing Man (2014), a sculpture that sets the tone for the remainder of the show. A concave piece of sheet metal stands atop a second piece, forming a sort of proscenium. On the vertical, a painted, nude, male figure stands with his arms outstretched. Kneeling before him and clutching a paintbrush, a female figure, also nude, applies paint to his body. Unlike the two-dimensional man, the woman is a true body in space, made from scraps of sheet metal stitched together with wire. The naturalistic position of her body — one leg cocked back for support, the outstretched arm — conveys a powerful sense of surrender. Of course, a woman’s surrender before a man is uneasy, because it is always loaded with a more disquieting significance. That Leaf’s work is deliberately primitive adds to the sense that this gesture of female subjugation is a timeless quandary.

A meditation on this link between work and submission continues throughout the show. In Figure Running on the Seam (2014) Leaf has appropriated the skeleton of an old sewing machine stand, suspending a curled wire encased in mesh between the two vertical spindles. At the end of the wire is the eponymous figure, which looks as if she is not so much running as she is collapsed from exhaustion. Beside it hangs a canvas, Making #1 (2013-2014), which depicts the sculpture in an incomplete state. The colors consist mostly of muted browns and grays, except for an emanation of crimson that seems to drip from the table of the base into a shocking puddle at the center right of the canvas. It’s a physical manifestation of the blood that is involved, figuratively or metaphorically, with putting oneself fully into a piece of work. The object is made from the remnants of a machine traditionally relegated to a woman’s domain, and a sly, feminist subtext is once again at play here, as the viewer is asked to confront what it means to have a sagging body caught between its gears.

Elsewhere, Leaf grapples with work and the surrender of the body as it relates to the most private realms. In acrylic painted on tin, Woman Carrying Child Up the Stairs (2011) depicts the female figure ascending a staircase, with a child slumped over her shoulder in deep sleep, while in Turning Pages (2012-2015), done in the same medium, an abstracted couple is caught in the act of intercourse. The woman lays facedown, an arm and a leg trail off in quivery wakes of paint that melt into the background and she offers no struggle, while the male figure kneels atop and astride her body. Both paintings afford the viewer a voyeuristic perspective — as though we are peeping through a doorway undetected, spying upon these private moments between intimates and witnessing their momentarily exposed vulnerabilities. In her ability to lay bare these fraught moments of humanity, one is hard pressed to think of a braver artist that June Leaf.

As Leaf’s work is quiet, and slowly unfolds its meaning, Joan Semmel’s paintings are explicit and confrontational. “Across Five Decades,” her recent career survey at Alexander Gray Associates, made clear that Semmel more definitively embraced the tenets of second-wave feminism. However, like Leaf, Semmel has made a priority of the female body. As she has said of her work, “I wanted to find an erotic visual language that would speak to women. I was convinced that the repression of women began in the sexual arena, and this would need to be addressed at the source.” This desire is unmistakable in her paintings from the 1970s, like the knockout Erotic Yellow (1973). In a vibrant palette of yellows, greens, and pinks, Semmel captures a nude and entwined couple in the middle of vigorous foreplay. Both of their faces are obscured by the man’s arm, and between his spread legs the woman has one hand clamped firmly beneath his balls.

This is especially pertinent in some of the later paintings, where the artist makes herself the subject. In Centered (2002) Semmel has rendered herself nude before a mirror, sitting in a relaxed pose with one arm curled casually around her bent knee, neither obviously flaunting nor hiding her middle-aged body. With her other hand, she holds a camera up to her eye; like in Erotic Yellow (and several other paintings in the show), the face is obscured. The obstruction of her face is not only arch however, but also emancipating. While she purports to an examination of the self, Semmel simultaneously subverts the viewer’s gaze by turning it back upon them with the use of the camera and mirror. The energy of Semmel’s work is triumphal and celebratory. Where Leaf plumbs feminine experience for its ambivalence, Semmel embraces its power.

June Leaf and Joan Semmel hail from a generation that was peculiar for female artists. Leaf, who was born in 1929 and Semmel, born three years later, came of age when work by women artists infrequently garnered attention, but who both nonetheless established steady working practices which saw them into the Women’s Liberation movement of the late 1960s and beyond. Is it too hopeful to believe that the work of these two veterans, who anticipated later twentieth century feminism, now entering the dialogue, is a harbinger of a shift away from that tired, long-established prejudice towards women’s art? For through their heightened sense of the corporeal, both Leaf and Semmel in different ways are unflinching in their ability to strip bare fragilities shared by all humankind. Looking at their work, we realize we have all been exposed.

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Taking a cue from Morton Feldman’s remark that “the love of the past in art is something very different to the artist than it is to the audience,” it’s fair to assume that the audience can remain attached to their favorite masters all their lives without very much ado. For the artist, however, a fixity upon certain figures can have unforeseen ramifications. Dictums such as this one show a (not always useful) concern over invention and replication, and demands that each new creation be also novel. One way to face this essential problem, “the anxiety of art,” to borrow Feldman’s phrase, is for the artist to put his/herself in a position to create work that is outside what they already know, so that “it speaks with its own emotion” and alternates from the tides of history. In his new publication of unfinished female nudes, Unfinished Drawing (2009 – 2014), newly out from Portland Oregon’s Ampersand Editions, artist Jason Brinkerhoff’s work both pays homage to the past and speaks to the moment-to-moment creative act, crystallizing his world in a dizzying series of forms.

Brinkerhoff’s work also raises questions, which upon further consideration, answer themselves. What are the historical meanings hidden beneath the aspects of Brinkerhoff’s figures? Where do all these nude women come from? If Brinkerhoff begins with a subject to which his apparently wild, half-abstract, half-representational style conforms, what on earth could it be? In the past, it wasn’t so easy to find so many naked women to draw. In Brinkerhoff’s nudes, a possible schema or constraint for Brinkerhoff seems traceable to what is found within art books and visits to the Modern wing of big city museums. The viewer is handed a certain nostalgia, an ever-shared celebration of past works, in pastiched references on subjects throughout art history. But nowhere can there be found the commentary such reference might otherwise necessitate: each piece in Unfinished Drawing maintains the appellation of “Untitled.” The female nudes in Brinkerhoff’s new publication seemed, as it were, to have been lying in wait for him throughout the entire 19th and 20th centuries, to resonate with each other through the turning of pages, rearing for a seemingly eternal return with unlimited repetition when considered in a larger context.

For the countless uncanny likenesses found in the nudes, whether explicitly or implicitly generated, neither the figures nor their famed male artists shall be named here; further attention to a fondness for past masters is simply less interesting than what’s to be gleaned from the artist’s style. And in the case of Unfinished Drawing, there is to be found a wieldy sum of sure-handed renderings of half-wrought drawings and collage beginnings, which the artist had been accumulating for years, until Ampersand proprietor Myles Haselhorst discovered them in a box during a studio visit. Flipping the page to have a look at the publication’s first reproduction, No. 58, Untitled (2009) — made using graphite, oil pastel, and acrylic on paper — one finds a pleasant if not mild introduction to what’s to follow: one demure eye, a nose, and the lips of what seems to be a woman with scribbled hair and a half-shaded face. The torn and found aspect of this piece is easily discernible. A few pages in, No. 2, Untitled (2010) in ink, graphite, and colored pencil, full of neon and gray scribbling and thinner dark ink lines, is unreadable in the figural sense, which offers relief from the veneer of resemblance found elsewhere.

The following page, print No. 159, is abstract in a different way: this figure has no face, head, or even a neck, meaning it has been whited-out using correction fluid, as a new, much larger face and androgynous body appears to be appearing in thick black ink to its right, perhaps with tongue alack. The sense of space in this composition, still early on in the book, is formally augmented by one thin line in the background to create a third, however unstable, dimension and a never-ending wall which sets our all-body figure in hot pink underwear in a rather close-up pose. A last notable aspect of this figure is that her one hand, the right, is rendered naturalistically, which makes the other, more stump-like limb seem to dissolve before its viewer, simultaneously reminding one of those little wooden modeling figurines.

Another, No. 41, possesses a similarly prosthetic figural look, which more resembles a wooden mannequin, seated with one stump of leg pointed toward the ground and the other with foot upon the surface on which she sits. This lady appears collaged, with her arm seemingly cut from another page, and a torso of blue-and-pink stripes with a circular, patterned right breast (just one) which also looks to have been cut and pasted. There is, in this piece’s textural variation, as one finds in others from the book, a curious sense of écorché, which, used for anatomical painting or sculpture, gives view of the body with the skin removed in order to display the musculature of the form.

Brinkerhoff is at his best when he’s messy, and unconcerned for representation; he possesses a remarkable ability to improvise and mix-and-match mediums, and scatter space by the use of collage and line. The carelessly brushed or “pushed” black ink lines of No. 133 Untitled take the viewer’s eye away from the act of recognition (into imagination) with a willful and wavering accent, over the surface of the page, as if to then have one feel around for raised and dried clumps of paint or wet ink spots.

Brinkerhoff’s messiness, this flourish of disorder set to a rhythmic texture via his diverse mediums, offers a highly pleasurable experience of tactility. The unpremeditated impasto — juxtaposed with sudden, finer lines — offers surprise, and is more expressive than any of the facial expressions (which are admittedly jejune) of the figures he presents. Brinkerhoff’s allowing of recurrence into his creative endeavor has, as reported by Haselhorst’s keenly penned introduction to this publication, and evinced by Brinkerhoff’s hundreds of works comme ça, signals the continuous production of new works. One can foresee the generation of even more possibility from further challenging constraints, and a rigorous consideration of figural properties that the images certainly raise. The cycle of female nudes á la the male artists of the past is closed for such talents.

Heinrich, Will. Jason Brinkerhoff: Unfinished Drawing: 2009 – 2014 (Portland: Ampersand Editions, 2014). Regular edition. ISBN: 9781941556078, 177 pages, $45 (Deluxe edition $850)

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