November 12 to December 22, 2017
188 East 2nd Street, between avenues A and B
New York City, karmakarma.org

With the distance that time affords, we can see communities of artists as neural networks, firing their energies into a nexus of human connections. Collectively they create a complex that nourishes and amplifies the efforts of each individual artist.

Jean Conner, Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington, and Franklin Williams, the artists gathered together at Karma, emerged from a small, but vital art scene in Northern California in the 1950s and 1960s. Their compatriots included Bruce Conner (who was married to Jean Conner), Jay DeFeo (who was married to Wally Hedrick), Joan Brown, Michael McClure, Manuel Neri, and Wallace Berman, who all worked and exhibited together.

These artists are featured in Anastasia Aukeman’s book Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association (University of California Press, 2016), which explores the personal and artistic fermentation that animated their time together in San Francisco, and how it reflected the Beat scene, radical politics, and the emerging counterculture. In their relative isolation from a major center of art, these artists were able to develop both their own personal visions and a model of mutual support and scrappy self-reliance that still resonates today.

The exhibition at Karma gives us just a slice of the four artists’ individually diverse work, while capturing aspects of the spirit of Bay Area art of the period. A revelation for me was the work of Franklin Williams, who was based early on in Oakland and taught for many years at the San Francisco Art Institute. The artist is 78, and in this exhibition are a selection of nine works from the 1960s and 1970s that are fresh and pulsing with high key color and textural surfaces, made of paint, yarn, and crochet thread. With their freewheeling, obsessive funkiness, they have a particularly contemporary feeling.

See and Always Be Seen (1975) is a large-scale painting, composed of strips of painted paper, rearranged and sewn with yarn, whose hieratic lattice structure is filled by swarming brush strokes, whorled lines, and stylized flames. The effect is of a kind of crazed joy. Untitled (1968) is an exuberant party of a sculpture, with a pillow-like form whose surface vibrates with springy tendrils of multi-colored yarn.

Jean Conner, who is 84, and until recently has rarely shown her work publicly. Her twenty-two small collages in the exhibition, dating from the 1960s through the 1980s, are all are composed of images culled from magazines. They are beautiful works in rich, subtle colors that are surreal, refined, and subversive, all at the same time.

Some of the works, such as Are You a Springmade?, use advertising imagery; its title and female figures, both sleeping and cavorting, are drawn from a long-running ad campaign for a line of sheets. Like a number of Conner’s works, it questions women’s social identity as an icon of commerce or desire. Most of Conner’s collages employ images from the natural world, often combining different species and settings to dream-like effect.

The work of Deborah Remington, who died in 2010, is full of fierce painterly gestures and allusions to the landscape. They reflect her studying with the Abstract Expressionists Clyfford Still, Elmer Bischoff, and others at the California School of Fine Arts. The paintings, four of which are very large, express Remington’s sense of ambition and her desire to create pictorial experiences that confront and encompasses the viewer.

Dr. S (1962) is painting with black, slashing brush strokes in a field of yellow-orange. The blocky forms coalesce into an instable image that recalls the Pacific Ocean shoreline that Remington drew during her formative years as an artist. Winter (1963) has a similar structure, with black strokes emerging from cadmium red to create a looming presence. With their central, isolated masses and hints of secreted interior spaces, these painting anticipate the hard-edged, shield-like paintings that Remington would become celebrated for after her move to New York in 1965.

Wally Hedrick, who died in 2003, was an iconoclastic artist whose work ranged from assemblages, to proto-Pop paintings, to politically charged works. He was a central figure among the Bay Area artists, and along with Remington and four others organized the seminal Six Gallery, the site of Alan Ginsberg’s first reading of his poem “Howl” in 1955.

In this exhibition the intersection of art and activism in Hedrick’s work is embodied in four examples of his Black Paintings. He began the series in the 1960s as a protest to the Vietnam War by taking over 50 of his earlier canvases and painting them black. The Black Paintings continued into the 2000s with works that opposed the first Iraq War.
Hedrick’s Vietnam/Irac (1970, 2003) spans the two wars, and like the other related works, is a painting in mourning. A tondo, whose canvas is split at its equator, is over 10 feet in diameter, and thickly painted in oil. Its rough, monochromatic surface suggests a shroud of negation that covers over a field of buried evidence.

The gathering together of the four artists in this exhibition reconstitutes a moment in which a confluence of individual and collective efforts expanded into a stream of art that continues to reverberate. It reminds us that art from anywhere can become a watershed that flows beyond itself into time and space.

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June 26 to August 7, 2015
619 West 27th Street, between 11th and 12th avenues
New York City, (212) 594-9478

A combination of absolute clarity and poetic weirdness has had me intrigued by Deborah Remington’s strange and beautiful paintings ever since I first saw them in the late 1960s. When I ask artists whose paintings seem related to hers if they know the work, usually they reply “no”, and I wondered when the paintings would be exhibited again.

A rare opportunity presented itself at Wallspace this summer, in an exhibition curated by Jay Gorney. This terrific show gathered three large paintings and twelve drawings from 1963 to 1983, serving as an introduction to this artist’s classic style. Remington (1930-2010) was an inventor of imaginal domains whose purely visual elements feel both tangible and psychologically compelling. She paints hieratic forms that suggest machined devices, architectural diagrams, interiors of the body, shields, and emblems. In their ambiguity, the possibilities inherent in the imagery keep opening up multiple readings of exposed cross-sections, places of refuge, routes of escape, and at times, majestic flowerings.

The paintings begin with March (1964) a surreal mash-up of folded forms emblazoned with abstract insignia and floating in indeterminate space, somehow reminiscent of de Chirico. Memphis (1969) is like the heart of an engine or the cavities of a skull. An interior vertical shaft glows red against a cool gray gradation, all surrounded by a segmented structure, itself encased in dark space. Strongly symmetrical, the complex, isolated form incorporates wavering contour lines and gives off a kind of mutant, robotic heat.

Dorset (1973) is a painting structured around emptiness, an oval that is an orifice, mirror, or space, simultaneously. Its carapace is animated by a radiance emanating from the sheer surfaces of cadmium red and cobalt blue that grade into black. The forms are echoed by lines in the same colors that pulse like hot, forged steel. Two small, errant forms float across the surface, beginning to occlude the hard perfection of this locked-in world.

In all of Remington’s work we are confronted by the mystery of a psychic urgency charged with myriad impulses: the mechanistic, the sexual, the claustrophobic, along with the display of beauty and power. She conjures a dream life of forms, an alternate reality that is weightless, yet one that we can almost taste. In her work we can see links to the art and design of the Machine Age, to Duchamp and his merging of the erotic and the mechanical, and to our own virtual lives amidst illuminated electronic screens. And we can see connections to the art of Japan, an early inspiration for Remington who studied calligraphy there for two years in the 1950s.

These and other influences can be divined in Remington’s deft, strong, and delicate drawings. The drawings in this exhibition came from three bodies of work, affording wonderful insights into her visual thinking. The drawings from the Soot Series from the 1960s are done in carbon black, with accents of red oxide, on cream-colored muslin. The centralized image appears to be suspended in a tight aura of light, in a field of granular darkness. The forms resemble grills of cars from the 1950’s, air vents, or ritual devices from traditional cultures.

The Adelphi Series of drawings from the 1960s were done in pencil and crayon on paper in soft tonalities of black, with accents of orange or ox-blood. They are complex and inventive works, which evince the same sense of hard-edged, graphic precision found in the paintings. In the drawings there is an organic feeling, with jostling forms resembling rocks or organs, tunneled through by passageways that arrive at interior repositories or galleries. In the two drawing from the 1980s, the third group tapped by this show, the elegant bunkers that Remington describes begin to lose parts of themselves that float free in space.

Deborah Remington started out as an art student and young artist in the Bay Area, and moved to New York in 1965. Her work was integral to the development of abstract painting during the 1960s and 1970s, and beyond, was exhibited extensively, and entered major American collections. Remington’s paintings have been widely recognized for their originality and invention. This exhibition rightly refocused the spotlight on the cryptically expressive side of her work.

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