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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January 10 through February 14, 2015
519 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 7100

John Miller: Here in the Real World at Mary Boone Gallery

Curated by Piper Marshall
January 10 through February 28, 2015
541 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 752 2929

Contemporary society is being constantly “bombarded by images” if the tiresome cliché is to be believed. It’s the cost of living in an information economy in which every moment of every person’s attention has been monetized and commodified. Practitioners of “old” media like painting occasionally invoke this platitude to make the “slowness” of their chosen medium seem transgressive or revolutionary in comparison to our “fast-paced culture.” John Miller, in a two-part exhibition split between Mary Boone and Metro Pictures, takes our attention economy as his baseline and, rather than trying to define himself in opposition to it, plays a game of trompe l’oeil that uses personal and media-sourced images to toy with notions of the materiality of art and the value of human, mechanical, and digital labor.

While Miller has embraced a wide range of materials throughout his long career, painting is the focus of both exhibitions. At Metro Pictures, a series of shaped Dibond panels depicting anonymous pedestrians fill one room: while these pieces may look like cut-out black-and-white photographs from a distance, they are painted in a thin acrylic grisaille that barely hides the artist’s preliminary pencil marks. The figures cast shadows on the walls behind them and seem to float in a featureless void. Carrying shopping bags, staring into space or gazing down at their phones, Miller’s pedestrians present themselves for the gaze of others while simultaneously looking oblivious to their excised surroundings. The pedestrian paintings are an offshoot of Miller’s “Middle of the Day” project, an ongoing endeavor in which the artist takes a photograph every day between 12 and 2pm. While his original photographs aren’t shown in either exhibition, the pedestrians and two murals, one in each gallery space, originate from this larger project.

From across the room, each mural appears to be a black-and-white photograph of a Chinatown street scene (at Mary Boone) or a back-alley loading dock (at Metro Pictures). The originary photographic images have been subjected to heavy manipulation that may not be obvious at a distant glance. Each image has been reduced to flat grayscale shapes, fragmented, and printed on vinyl wallpaper. Pedestrians, windows, and signs have been duplicated and cloned within the street scene: a stretched-out sign repeats the same Chinese characters a half dozen times, while a man and his doppelganger each cross the street with identical strides. One side of each scene is a mirror image of the other, with enough exceptions that this process isn’t immediately apparent (words and street signs aren’t mirrored along with the rest of the image). The mirroring is more obvious in the loading dock mural, which has its reflective axis placed in the corner of the room. The stones and debris on the ground beneath the platform are not mirrored; neither is the graffiti on the otherwise identical walls. Somewhere in there is an image of reality, something depicting the actual world, but we have no way of knowing which fragments, if any, retain that indexicality.

Instead of pedestrians, Mary Boone has a series of paintings of game show sets, depopulated of any contestants and presented as garishly colored stages. Unlike the pedestrians and the murals, these pieces appear to be photographs from afar, and still appear photographic rather than painterly when inspected up close. While the gallery checklist records them as “acrylic on canvas,” they look more like inkjet prints of digitally compressed YouTube screenshots. The twist is that this series was made between 1998 and 1999, several years before such technologies became widely available. Like the murals (which could have been made equally well using a quick Photoshop cutout filter or painstakingly rendered by hand) we have no way of knowing how much (if any) human, mechanical, or digital labor went into the production of these paintings. If the artist and gallery are to be taken for their word, it’s a clever “Mechanical Turk” trick: the paintings look digital but were apparently painted by hand. One piece, Labyrinth I (1999) has a motion-controlled speaker mounted above it that plays the garbled sounds of a crowd whenever anyone walks by. The canvas is rounded on the edges, giving it the shape of an old CRT television set. Labyrinth I could pass for an abstract geometric painting if not for a fragment of a sign, reading “HOME GYM,” a prize that gives the bright colors and curves their meaning as game show stage elements. Despite the dated references to The Price is Right and obsolete televisions, these pieces have aged surprisingly well: they may have greater resonance today thanks to Miller’s apparent prognostication of the explosion of streaming Internet video services that chop up, compress, and reconstitute images without requiring human intervention.

While the technique behind the game show paintings is mysterious, a more recent series of paintings, split between both galleries, offers a more transparent view of the artist’s process with depictions of reality show contestants in moments of apparent emotional collapse. Like the aforementioned cliché regarding today’s saturation of images, denigration of reality TV has become a trope among those who feel their own cultural consumption is above such base programming. A number of artists have engaged this medium without being so patronizing: performance artist and writer Kate Durbin’s book E! Entertainment (Wonder, 2014) consists of scripts, screenplays, and retellings of reality show scenarios written in the deadpan style of a stenographer. Miller’s reality-show paintings deal with their emotionally charged content with a similar detachment. Close-up shots of heads dominate the canvases, looking more like preliminary underpaintings in umber and white than like finished works. Much thinner than the similarly toned pedestrian series, each painting’s grid and pencil marks are visible even at a distance. While many painters strive to cover up their sketches, Miller seems to embrace the honesty of this technique, stripping away figure painting’s veil of naturalism and presenting these paintings as records of his manual labor.

The games Miller plays with manual, mechanical, and digital reproduction disorient the viewer, calling into question assumptions about the ways in which our sense of reality is mediated through the images and programming to which we are “constantly exposed” (to use another cliché). While the grisaille paintings of pedestrians and reality TV stars emphasizes the hand of the artist and his process, the murals and game show paintings disrupt such fetishization of manual labor by making us agnostic to the actual nature of their production. The pieces on view in both galleries bask in the paradoxical history of their materiality and production: some are naked paintings that plainly exhibit the marks of their creation while other paintings may or may not be “paintings” at all. Miller’s games may be rewarding to some and frustrating to others, but the disorientation he channels is the essence of our age: the loss of distinction between fact and fiction, original and copy, humanity and digitality.

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The painting and drawing practices of Alexander Ross, always in fundamental opposition, have increasingly been cross-pollinating. The paintings create photorealist illusions, and are thus, to a high degree, preordained. They are mappings of a kind, in which, in Caroll Dunham’s appreciative phrase, Ross “systematizes rendering as a conflation of sonar and paint-by-numbers.” The images they map are purpose-made glossy digital photo-collages of Plasticine sculptures, built in turn upon ideas in the drawings. As for the drawings themselves, they are pure inventions. They grow before our eyes. And if the synthetic atmosphere of the paintings can seem anaerobic (yet so viscously seductive that one willingly forswears oxygen), the drawings are earthy and florid, drawn as if by an ecstatic 19th-century Dr. Seuss looking through a microscope and reporting back from the microbial frontier. Simultaneous gallery shows in 2008 at David Nolan and Marianne Boesky showcased Ross’s drawings in relation to his then better-known paintings, emphatically revealing their opposition, but also their mediated interdependence as stages along a continuum. Think of Ross’s linkage of methods — drawing, painting, photography, digital manipulation, sculpture, and collage — as a fan belt designed to keep his mad-scientist ideas from overheating, to the point, as has often been noted, of post-human chilliness. But a thaw was evident as far back as those twin exhibitions of 2008. Hybrid drawing-photo works, graphically outlined paintings, and color-banded pencil illusions showed that Ross was in fact beginning to put drawing and painting procedures into direct contact, step by Gregor Mendel-like step.

The new work on view at David Nolan, a decade into these controlled experiments, exhibits full chromosomal exchange: the drawings are now essentially photorealistic, while the paintings invite graphic ideas into isolated Plasticene nodules and their increasingly open-ended backgrounds. Even more, the untitled paintings denoted (AR5072), (AR5073) and (AR5075) let drawing in from the beginning, where it lays down the law. Opting out of Ross’s previously inviolable figure/ground, sky/horizon convention, these unprecedented canvases offer soft frontal grids that can be carved into. This relief space is a revival of an established drawing motif, a vertical slice through cellular gray matter that exposes visceral pockets and interrupted ducts — rendered with Ross’s familiar low-bandwidth slime-o-realism. Yet, despite the sense of hidden rot or infestation thereby exposed, the tissue wall is soft and rounded, not a wound but a specimen cultured against laboratory glass, its graphic undulations blending smoothly, almost spongily, into photorealist punctures and cavities.

Normally at such border zones Ross lays it on thick, as in another hybrid canvas, (AR5232), which places a red trompe l’oeil fungal stalk abruptly against a backdrop version of the cell-wall motif, this one scrawled by oil stick into wet ground. In the context of Ross’s slow-boat methodology this loose sgrafitto is wildly Mattissean. But even so, it’s just another map-able asset, like the piled-up ridges of his fully photoreal passages. There, his meticulous sculpting of illusion owes equal amounts to the shifty self-consciousness of Gerhard Richter and the atelier positivism of Chuck Close. Or, going wide angle, we might take bearings on the viscid leafage of Thomas Cole and the encaustic hatchings on the maps and flags of Jasper Johns — the granddaddy and the grand Dada of American landscape. In that suspiciously empty wilderness, Ross may be our best contemporary guide.

The untitled paintings denoted (AR5233), (AR5234), and (AR5235) are far more typical of Ross’s exhaustive survey of a brave new world. They adhere to his longstanding if ceaselessly tweaked convention, mentioned above, of placing foreground figures against distant looming skies. Within this controlled environment he has been cataloguing “plastic life forms,” as he calls them, for some 20 years, as well as their degree of digital chunkiness, edge conditions, focal quality, and color spread. The startling twist in these new landscapes is that… well, actually, they aren’t landscapes at all, but faces. Or at any rate, Archimboldo-esque coagulations that insist on being read as faces. A couple of them sport genuinely fleshy tongues, though whether the tongues are human or amphibian or functionally attached is up for grabs. A half-dozen drawings on view also look back at the viewer, either as masks or dimly sentient beings, or maybe phantasms of a troubled mind. Some sport tongues that, as with those in the paintings, seem to have been ripped wriggling and wet from a higher life form. These new drawings closely follow Ross’s photorealistic painting procedures, though more atmospherically, by means of delicate, interfering layers of crayon color. At this moment the fan belt seems to be turning in reverse, as the paintings are driving the drawings.

As for the in-your-face faces: pareidoliac forms have always hovered a small step from cognition in the work, but here Ross takes a giant leap into the grotesque. No longer the objective bio-lab technician, the artist stands revealed as Victor Frankenstein. But will the stitched-together features in the new work come to life? Do they imply an embryonic — maybe even hostile ­­— intelligence?

From the evidence of the strangely goofy visages, there is little to worry about thus far. The Pugsley-and-Wednesday tongues notwithstanding, a preschool Jeff Koons might have Play-Dohed the blobbier ones among them. On the other hand, the most refined of the drawings, (AR5238), is creepily humanoid, its Plasticine skull sharpened to a Neolithic spear point. Protuberant horns and blades can be found in the face-conjuring paintings too, but here the heroic landscape scale evokes distant mountaintops as much as lethal body armor. (At 90 inches tall, one canvas is, I believe, Ross’s largest ever.) Still, the sense of scale is unsettled, and unsettling: the sharp peaks are preternaturally clear, and the over-exposed highlights glare forensically.

The more you look, the more pathogenic the paintings begin to feel, as if they might be dumb, deadly parasites whose incipient facial mimicry is evolving to penetrate the defenses of host organisms. If these repulsively seductive paintings feel unhealthy to view, that is no small accomplishment, and lesser artists would stop there. Ross, on the other hand, has just opened a Pandora’s Box of drawing ideas — new spaces, new structures — that the paintings now must pay attention to. Expect further mutations.

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