September 7 to October 7, 2018
56 Bogart Street, between Harrison Place and Grattan Street
Brooklyn, slaggallery.com

On a visit to Slag Gallery to view Tim Kent’s solo show (his third with the gallery), the artist was found deep in conversation with a visitor about the history of the electrical grid system. Somewhere between his description of “the largest machine on earth” and his deliberations on the “efficacy of coal-powered plants,” however, I tuned out the lesson and entered the painting on the wall behind him, Isotopia, a large landscape where a yellow matrix hums though a desiccated valley. While Kent has an encyclopedic mind for his chosen subject, in Dark Pools and Data Lakes, the paintings themselves are where the titans of technology, politics, and ecology are battling it out.

The paintings are large, over eight feet, and Kent evidently made them quickly, with all but two stretched and painted since June. The energy of that physical struggle, the speed of the attack, is palpable. His forms are at once complex and boldly wrought. Their roughhewn quality, counterintuitively, endows them with history. They feel worn and corroded in a manner that more embellishment would have polished away.

The subjects of Kent’s paintings are threaded into a complex three-point perspectival framework, matrices that seem to trace invisible patterns: the electrical grid, microwaves, radio transmissions, or, in the case of Isotopia, radioactive particles leftover from atomic testing. Yet, these forces unseen are figuratively present in Kent’s bold paint lines. He has left the indentation of rulers and tape, which act like sizzling wires, and paint splatters, which spark and fly off the frame.

The grid structures themselves are colorless. Or, rather, they adopt the color of whatever is around them. This is no doubt because they have no physical reality. We can see them, but the figures in the pictures cannot lean on them. There is no solid scaffolding, only void. The cloaked walker in Stored Memory is a rare figure who is grounded in the landscape. However, ringed in blurry, monochromatic static, she feels like an apparition from the past. You don’t trust that she’s actually there. And then you begin to distrust the blue landscape around her, as if everything might be a projection.

The particular species of desaturated ultramarine in Stored Memory is related to what Rebecca Solnit calls “the blue of distance.” Beginning art students learn to use this color to carve out deep space in their paintings. Yet, this blue that should sit all the way back in the traveler’s imagination becomes just one more component in Kent’s matrix. The Phthalo blue-greens beat electric behind it in Stored Memory and in Data Lake and Order Types. They glow from underneath like the operating system itself.

Colored light doesn’t warm or cool the figures in Kent’s paintings. The segments of bodies, screens, and landscape in Order Types, for instance, don’t affect one another because they are not really in the same place so much as dialed in separately. This disjunction of color, paired with large areas of monochrome, leaves the paintings to be governed by their value structures. They often feel black and white with a high chroma overlay, like early hand-colored film.

A great strength of these paintings is their vast depth of field and playful spatial structure. The eye delights in lowering itself into the scaffolding and seeing how far back it can go. In descending these layered planes, we wonder, how frightened should we be? Perhaps we are in a video game, with fake stakes and nine lives. Data Lake certainly suggests a half-built virtual reality, with its hyper-saturated palette, disjoined forms, and still half exposed digital bone structure. But it has none of the clunky surrealism of computer graphics. And the figures in Order Types and Schism are fleshy. The ground, when it appears in Kent’s paintings, is earthy, organic.

Are they futurescapes then, the fanciful equivalent of a doomsayer’s sign? Guarding against that is their relationship to painting history. The weightiness of the figures suggests grandfathers in German Expressionist painting. The disjointedness suggests fathers in Neo Rauch or the Leipzig school. Data Lake reads as a spawn of Hudson River School painting. In fact, many of the works have roots in American history, with sources including John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence and a Washington press image of John F. Kennedy. These usher in a creeping sense of the familiar. The work materializes as more mirror than invention.

The figures in Order Types gather around empty treatises, wringing and clapping their blood clot hands. Caught between the human – the imminent rot of those fleshy protrusions from suits – and the floorless web, vertigo sets in. Kent offers no escape: no solid footing, no brighter character to choose, no space outside the grid. Rather, the paintings give us a chance to feel the awesome weight of the systems, often invisible, that implicate and imprison us, intricate structures built with our sliced and severed parts.

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June 3 to July 17, 2016
56 Bogart Street (between Harrison and Grattan streets)
Brooklyn, 212 967 9818

“A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.” –bell hooks

I went to see “With Passion,” the current group show on view at Slag Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, prepared to be absorbed in something other than headlines. The despairing news cycle had been unfolding that a male Stanford University student, recently convicted of raping an unconscious female behind a campus dumpster, had been spared his recommended prison sentence by the presiding judge. The white, former star athlete Brock Turner was instead sentenced to only six months in the county jail, a slap on the wrist for the degradation of a woman’s body.

Passion and compassion are twinned themes and philosophical conceits — emotions that, living in this strange and crestfallen moment, seem especially worthy of contemplation. The Latin root of both words is pati, meaning “to suffer,” which suggests that by choosing to plumb these emotions, we can better understand personal and collective grief, and use it in the service of activating meaningful change in the face of injustice. In “With Passion,” five international artists probe what it is to be ardent, how that fervor stimulates a response in viewers, and the ethics, on the part of the audience, of taking that response out into the world.

Six drawings by Erika Bagylas, selected from a larger series entitled Don’t Become a Statistic! (2013–2014) open the show. Bagylas hails from Hungary; existence during the nation’s three-decade, Soviet-supported Kádár era is often the subject of her interrogation. She refers to the extreme censorship experienced by Hungarians during the period as “social trauma as life situation.” Bagylas frequently incorporates performance into her practice, which is reflected even in the static works on view here. Some are theatrical, as in The Circus Belongs to Everyone (2014) where two figures walk on stilts and juggle, respectively. Others exhibit a more mournful quality. In The Supporters (2014), one woman rests her hand on the back of another, who in turn rests her hand on a larger figure, covered with a sheet like a ghost. Perpetrators (2014) depicts two bodies each standing on a box, facing each other and pointing their fingers at one another like guns in a chilling intimation of violence. In each drawing the human forms are drawn in delicate crosshatching on black paper with white ink, with an empty space where the body’s head should be. Those blank heads seem indicative of individuals from whom something primal has been stolen. Whether that comes at the hands of a totalitarian regime, or a lone perpetrator, the pain is evident and it transcends Hungary’s political history, resonating universally.

Some of the strongest works in the show are those that directly counteract suffering. Socially engaged artist Jody Wood’s video work In the Black Box (Looking Out) (2016) and its corresponding photographic series, Client Abstraction (2016), present here, are derived from a project she completed earlier this year. In Choreographing Care (2016), Wood ran a workshop where a theater troupe taught social and care workers to make use of warm up and cool down techniques actors use in preparation to play characters in agonizing situations. Workers in these therapeutic professions experience a high degree of “secondary trauma” as a result of the constant support they give to others enduring extreme circumstances. In the two-channel video, actors demonstrate these methods on one screen while on the second Dionisio Cruz and Jan Cohen-Cruz, a married couple who are a therapist and a drama professor respectively, discuss secondary trauma as it relates to each of their professions. Hearing them relay their personal experiences while simultaneously watching the actors demonstrate the exercises is stirring. One actress, lying supine, has her hair stroked by another while a third gently caresses her legs and feet with a soft cloth. The love and mindfulness put into these efforts is plain, and underscored by the Cruz couple’s intimate discussion of the significance of emotional release. Soon, the woman to whom these ministrations are being applied is sobbing cathartic tears.

Elsewhere, the work of Masha Zusman, one of two Israeli artists featured, proves restorative. In her labor-intensive process Zusman makes engravings with a mechanical pen, and draws meticulously in ballpoint on found wood. While she might be best known for her works completed on immense, wooden packing crates, a selection of her smaller pieces on discarded wood panels is showcased here. To her materials she has added Hammerite, paint intended to be applied directly to metals. The decision to use this substance, which is not readily available in the United States, is inspired, as the color it achieves on wood is lush and sensuous. In Untitled (2015), gold Hammerite flows across the wood panel in creamy hills and valleys. It is tactile, almost three-dimensional, and I had the distinct sensation of wanting to run my hands over it. Zusman has engraved the top half of the panel with an intricate design reminiscent of a William Morris textile pattern, which she then colored completely with brick-red ballpoint. The work is fervid, even erotic in its juxtaposition of color and texture. In an exhibition that demands much sober contemplation, Zusman’s work is a welcome reminder of the tangible, the carnal, and the wonder that exists in the world.

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.” Co-curators Naomi Lev and Jovana Stokic open their curatorial statement with Simone Weil’s timely words. When I sat down to begin writing this after a couple days of reflection, I opened my computer to discover that overnight a gunman had entered a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, shot dead 49 people and wounded another 53. It was the worst shooting massacre in modern American history and I am despondent, marinating in the reinforced knowledge that so many different kinds of bodies can be so easily and callously disposed of in this country. I cannot separate this from the experience of seeing “With Passion.” To be passionate is to be moved by strong feelings or beliefs; to be compassionate is to be compelled to act because of the suffering of others. This small show in its small space is nonetheless a booming visual manifesto that calls not only for empathy, but also for revolutionary, loving action in defiance of the hatred and cruelty that have become familiar cultural markers. May it resonate.

The post Live Fully and Well: Art at Slag Gallery in a Time of Trauma appeared first on artcritical.

July 13 to August 30, 2012
56 Bogart Street, Unit 005
Brooklyn, 212 967 9818
Thursday to Saturday, 12-6pm

Claudia Chaseling’s small but ambitious show consists of a video, a handful of canvasses and a large, vaguely squid-shaped wall painting that appears to be divulging, or perhaps digesting, a number of discrete miniature paintings from within its unruly parameters. Strong looping forms, deadpan-color contrasts and decisive execution formally define an exhibition that initially seems engaged in a playful riff on contemporary abstraction. The more slowly absorbed narrative and imagistic elements of the show point, however, to an unexpected cluster of concerns: chance, anomaly, violence and the imaginings of post-apocalyptic experience.

Infiltration is one of those rare cases where a show consisting primarily of two-dimensional works is enriched by the addition of a video – a curatorial gesture that can often feel like an eager-to-please nod to newer media.  In the video, Murphy the Mutant, the hands of the artist turn the pages of a picture book of her own making. The book recounts the story of a gentle, genetically aberrant multi-legged creature, Murphy, born of normal parents into a Middle-Eastern, war-torn setting. Murphy is, in a matter of a couple of page-turns, projected through escalating global violence off the earth’s surface and into an interplanetary voyage. His physical journey is, as is suggested by the straightforward prose of the narration, accompanied by a parallel emotional exploration into extremes of loneliness and isolation.

The video is a poignant, if peculiar, piece on its own. In the context of the show it serves additionally as a key to accessing the two-dimensional pieces. Chaseling’s paintings and drawings, some of which are on rounded supports, simultaneously invite readings of purely abstract shape scenarios as well as of landscape, usually that of a craggy, volcanic or other-worldly sort. Fluorescent colors and jagged edges dominate, and liberal use is made of strips, stripes and bold outlines. Chaseling’s fast and loose play of planes often alludes to recessive space, but her forms more often than not (and usually at their best) push urgently against the picture plane, articulated by  brushstrokes which vibrate and appear almost to jump away from the very shapes they are meant to delineate. This restless instinct is fully vented in works like High Plane Escape (2011) and Virtual Escape (2012) where solid black forms extend from the canvas outwards onto the wall and daringly onto the unvarnished wood of the gallery floor. It’s hard not to think, when viewing these outward-bound shapes, projecting from the painting’s like emissaries or orange-pips, of poor little Murphy’s skyward trajectory.

There is of course a tradition of “painting away from the canvas”, from the playful off-frame whimsies of the baroque and mannerist artists through to Fontana to Stella. More recent variations of the approach tend to draw from a modernist challenge of the conventions of the form, often powerfully – and cerebrally – questioning expectations of illusionism and representation. Chaseling, by contrast, seems to be working from a less self-conscious motivation. Her hors-piste maneuvers refreshingly appear to spring from a spontaneous, if anxious, impulse to shift the impact of the painting beyond the restrictions of the canvas’s home base.

One possible interpretation of Infiltration is as a subtle expression, through stories and paint, of the once-romantic notion of the isolated journey – the sublime and terrifying experience of traveling beyond all knowns. Collectively the works in the show seem evocative of utopian and dystopian worlds, alternately inviting and threatening, as well as of the possibility, or necessity, of physical movement between them. It might be noted that the inventive thematic Chaseling here presents might have been strengthened by greater attention to pictorial variety and formal sensitivity – for all of their voltage the colors and shapes of the works sometimes cancel each other out to dulling effect. Taken as the unified entity Infiltration seems intended to be, however, the show leaves a powerful impression of an artist addressing difficult issues in a process of piecing together and striking out.

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