September 29 to November 4, 2018
92 Plymouth Street, at Washington Street
Brooklyn, smackmellon.org

Luisa Caldwell’s recent exhibition at Smack Mellon, A Cat in God’s Garden, radiated nostalgia for summer, conjuring delicious fantasies of sitting in the garden amongst glorious blossoms with endless time to read. Caldwell’s show exuded such goodwill it was hard to resist, and the artist even installed a beautiful bunch of fresh flowers from her own garden in one corner of the installation and offered visitors a free poster of one of her drawings. But even as I was hypnotized by the shimmering mirage and wished it to be real, I began to see that beneath its heartwarming surface there was much more to this complex, intelligent, deeply imbricated installation.

The show comprised of 210 drawings, each eight and a half by 11 inches, arranged in a grid in two large wall panels, and six hand detailed vases on books stacked on wooden stools or chairs. The drawings of flora from a distance read like decorative ceramic tiles. On closer inspection, however, they revealed a complex intellectual and emotional narrative. Some were composed and rendered to suggest historical botanical drawings, many were even overlaid with geometric shapes and patterns. Other drawings were more compositionally formal with vases and flower arrangements, systematically drawn to suggest the illusion of depth. This alludes to the European and American floral painting tradition and its attendant symbolism, including the memento mori. Others were drawn in the lighter amateur style of nineteenth-century “lady-painters” who used the wholly different symbolism encoded in the “language of flowers” according to species. And still other drawings were flat and illustrative as if in preparation for decorative schemes or designs. Many are filled with such life and energy that they seem to jump off the page into the exhibition space with the over-brilliant color of markers that sing out with bright, glowing fluorescent colors. In among the various panels the sun, as a bright fluorescent highlighter-yellow orb, dances around repeatedly to tie the entire happy, zappy pattern together. And, hidden deep in the foliage of one is a small black cat.

The stacks of books are arranged at intervals around the exhibition space, further recalling the feeling of a summer garden. A general sense on bonhomie pervades the place. On closer inspection, however, as with Caldwell’s drawings, ambivalences reveal themselves. The books, arranged by size, are mostly art tomes and coffee table titles from major museum blockbuster shows. Most of the subjects are mainstream modern artists, mostly male, known for their interest in color–Matisse, for instance, who is represented several times. The narrative is amplified by several books on gardens and gardening. But Caldwell then embeds one ceramic book of her own creation in each stack. And it is with this sly disruptive act that she temporarily pivots the narrative. In one stack, for example, she entitles her book Nanny and her Flowers; in another, For the Love of Cats; and in yet another, Hinter Wipflinger di Bassano. The ceramic books stop us temporarily in our reading of titles but we read on, absorbing them as part of a larger narrative. Yet, the memory of each ceramic book creates a slipstream of significance that worms into our minds. Caldwell’s references to her personal history, to our relationships with cats, and to the underground collector and gardener confound and tease us. We cannot open the ceramic books, so unlike the other volumes they are mute and mysterious, keeping their secrets permanently hidden and sealed within their clay covers.

This refrain is echoed in the heavy decorative vases that surmount each column of books. Five of the ready-made vases are etched with new imagery through sandblasting and the final one uses an underglaze. Almost all of them feature flowers and plants from behind which, on one side, the image of a large sitting cat stares out at the viewer. The stylized bands of floret decorations and sealed lids are clearly intended to evoke ancient funereal vases. One even presents a formal portrait of an Egyptian cat sitting erectly, sporting a bejeweled two-tiered collar and ear rings. Caldwell notes the Egyptian cat-headed goddess Bastet as one of her inspirations: A goddess who protected the Pharaohs, she later morphed into the goddess of perfumes, notably, in relation to Caldwell’s installation, produced from flowers. The staring cats that protect these sealed vessels, like Caldwell’s ceramic books, disrupt and disorder the idyll, because, as we all know, when you bring any cat into a garden chaos ensues.

And so, cats seem to disrupt the idyll of Caldwell’s ideal garden. Just as dogs symbolize fidelity, cats stand for infidelity and indifference. They are the companions of witches, the manifestation of evil, and the source of chaos. They are hunters who watch and plan, who feign sleep when plotting attack. And, like Caldwell’s irrepressible flowers, they have never been completely domesticated. As Caldwell herself notes, her use of cats derives from their ubiquity on the Internet, but while we are seduced by the cuteness of kittens online, they will soon enough reveal their true character and do something truly awful.

While Caldwell’s show at first felt almost preternaturally happy, everything she puts in her garden takes on multiple, sometimes conflicting, sometimes conflating significances. Her world does not sit quite squarely on its axis. She creates images that superficially comfort and appease our fears but that also start an itch at the back of our brain. She builds meaning cumulatively and creates subtle resonances until we begin to feel that her garden of earthly delights could turn on a dime into a darker, more fearsome place, even if it hasn’t done so yet. Having set a cat loose in Eden, Caldwell sits back among the flowers, with some light reading, to watch the results of her work.

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January 18 to March 2, 2014
92 Plymouth Street at Washington?Street
Dumbo, Brooklyn, 718 834 – 8761

The factory floor that is Smack Mellon’s Piranesi-like main space cannot but play itself, and many remarkable installations have issued from the challenges of its remote nooks and crannies. The space seems particularly filled up in Rob Hickman’s emptied-out installation, DMMDIA. Spanning an enormous wall, Hickman’s 3-D, polyhedral mirror sculpture reflects, infinitely fragmented in its pyramidal teeth, one of the most extraordinary art spaces in the city, not forgetting its spectacular view.

Hickman adds no extraneous glitz, just a concentrated rectangle of it. Museum-scale horizontality is emphasized by the artist’s careful treatment of the sculpture’s 48-foot long top and bottom edges, cleanly sliced off by coincident planes of polyhedra. A regular march of spikes reveals itself at this surgical boundary. If the interior is somewhat “soft” in its razor-sharp geometry, these rows of protrusions bring to mind the rhythmic menace of a diamond-studded dog collar.

DMMDIA’s combination of savagery, elegance, and gaudiness can stand for a legacy of subterranean Brooklyn clubland, in which, for a quarter century, mirror-ball party culture has gotten enthusiastically satirized by DIY artist-entreprenueur-participants. Hickman is a first-wave insider of the Williamsburg scene, at any rate, and visitors are free to imagine DMMDIA lording it over a dark, noisy warehouse – a rave avant la lettre. But silence and broad daylight work just as well, the sculpture casting a glittery, fracturing spell over the eternal now –– like “retinal shrapnel” in the vivid words of the press release. Therefore, a suggestion to Smack Mellon: In the spirit of Warhol’s Empire and Marclay’s The Clock, why not schedule an all-night viewing of DMMDIA? Begin with a wild party and end with sleeping bags and hangovers.

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There is a special excitement to seeing a video artist take into consideration the space in which his or her piece is shown. Pawel Wojtasik’s site-specific installation at Smack Mellon, At the Still Point, does this beautifully.  The breaks in his 5-channel video, projected onto a massive wall, divides the video by the row of support columns in this large open space.  Each video panel is 6’ wide and 21 feet tall, making the overall projection 30 feet plus wide, achieving a sculptural presence.

The size of the projection is matched by the scale of its content. At the Still Point shows a series of mass activities in India such as a dhobi ghat (laundry facility) outside of Mumbai, a ship-breaking yard in Alang, cremation rites on the banks of the Ganges, a shantytown at night.

The laundry scenes were especially striking: hundreds of men standing in grey water, slapping and rubbing laundry in ancient stone cubicles. Colored squares of drying laundry hang in rows like prayer flags and make an immense, steamy landscape. The camera takes in the scene sometimes from overhead, uniting all five panels, and sometimes one panel focuses upon a single, sweating individual, or a small group.  The juxtaposition of close ups and wide angles gives a personal face to the awesome mass activity.

In the ship-breaking yard, masses of Indian workers use hand tools to dismantle Western steel vessels, bit by bit, for recycling. Here, a wide angle shot of the enormous ship becomes the landscape with tiny workers held aloft with bamboo scaffolding and cranes crawling across the surface like ants. A long series of images takes place at night, the camera voyeuristically peering into a shanty of domiciles lit from within.  These moments are quiet and still. Close-up glimpses of poverty and domestic life contrast with the vast busyness of the other activities.  Men perform cremation rites at the banks of the Ganges, in the last scene, in mesmerizing slow motion.

An ambient, but powerful soundscape, created by electronic musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello, unites the 30 minute video and incorporates the sounds of the scenes—snapping laundry, the dripping water, squealing cranes, murmurs and chants of the workers, ringing hammers, hissing blowtorches and irons.

At the Still Point explores the contradictions of Indian society (or any other so-called “emerging” economic power, like China) that is pre-industrial and at the same time, increasingly modern.  The work presents the themes of life, death and rebirth in juxtaposition with consumption, destruction and renewal as a powerful metaphor for the rapid transition to a modern capitalistic country.  The scale of the video and the space in which it is being shown combine to arresting effect.

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It is hard to imagine an installation looking better in the industrial Smack Mellon main exhibition hall than Kirsten Hassenfeld’s current installation, Dans La Lune.

Smack Mellon is a venue of raw physicality, with towering concrete columns framed in industrial steel, so it is easy for works to be swallowed whole in its cavernous expanse.  Hassenfeld subdues this beast of a space with the humblest of materials: little more than white vellum and foam core.  So white, so lacking in mass, Dans La Lune is phantasm, a chimera, part paper-doll and part Fabergé egg.

There is mind blowing virtuosity at play in the individual objects that make up this installation. For instance, using only craft scissors, vellum, pipe cleaners, PVA archival glue, and the technique of quilling (curling the paper by applying the edge of the scissors), Hassenfeld fashions a shepherd with a lamb, ensconced in a castle, all hanging from a larger jewel. But a heightened mastery of craft can only be a first step to understanding this work. Technique in itself, even this masterly, can only serve as a vehicle for meaning, not the meaning itself.

From a distance, Dans La Lune appears to be a constellation of hanging spheres sprouting landscapes of pale geodes. Closer inspection reveals not only jewel and filigree shapes, but also silhouettes cut accordion-like into portraits, doily animals and figures, scenes of Eros and Psyche, and other assorted images.  In short, the kinds of images associated with heirlooms, cameos, and other personal objects most often categorized as keepsakes, and most often found decorating the top of bedroom dressers.  Except instead of being made from the usual durable materials – precious metals, polished stones, and carved ivory – they are here presented in the flimsiest of materials and, it must be added, at many times the scale of the objects that inspired them.

In this disposable age of ours one could  take the hyperbolic scale and choice of materials to be indicative of an ironic or belittling commentary towards keepsakes.  But this installation is simply too circumspect to have been made by an uncaring hand.  Something warm and embracing, not cool and distancing is clearly being asserted.

The key to Hassenfeld’s installation lies not in the objects themselves but in the negative space that exists between them.  Not mere empty space, but a potent, energized negative space that is somehow integral to the understanding of the object’s identity.  Specifically,Dans La Lune is installed in the center of the gallery and occupies about a third of the area.  If we count only the volume occupied solely by the individual elements they fill, at best, five percent of the total exhibit hall.  But the reality is that for the viewer, the perceived space ofDans La Lune is not defined by the objects in it, but by the negative space that surrounds it: that charged awareness which floods the entire gallery with shimmering warmth.

The sum is greater than the parts, but the parts point the way: abounding references to family and memory, heirlooms and ancestry, fabricated with undeniable care, and expanded to monumental proportions from apparently gossamer components that have the capacity to charge a gallery the size of a ballroom. Dans La Lune, according to Hassenfeld, translates loosely as “head in the clouds”, which is odd in a way since the experience of standing beneath and among its hanging cosmology leaves one feeling, more than anything else, unaccountably, wonderfully, grounded.

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