January 18 through February 22, 2015
348 South 4th Street (between Hooper and Keap streets)
Brooklyn, 347 776 1023

For “LIVE/WORK,” Annette Wehrhahn shows a new series of paintings and other propositions that revisit the indeterminable boundary between the space dedicated to living and the space for work — with the products of each infiltrating each other as equals. Black work boots and heeled pumps sit on a ledge above and in the periphery of paintings, some works insert materials like drop cloth that point back to the conditions of their making, and others include personal effects. Hide (2015) is a shirt with acrylic on canvas. The fabric, suffused with paint, is fixed and flattened with long sleeves outstretched and a jam of wrinkles permanently set. It’s worth noting that Wehrhahn is a founding member of Soloway, and her apartment and studio are on site behind the storefront exhibition space — putting Wehrhahn in the middle of the project that she and her collaborators have successfully built over the past five years, and amplifying the live-work dynamic. On this occasion, the exhibition intentionally extends into Wehrhahn’s domestic space in back where Candles (2014) hangs just inside against a lime green wall above the bed.

Werhahn’s Portable Cave Paintings relate the dimensions of the artist’s body against the work and exhibition space. The paintings are on swaths of unstretched canvas nearly as tall as the space is long, and in the earthy palette of Lascaux or Altamira. On the surface, Wehrhahn has traced her body with oil stick in overlapping seated or reclining configurations — physically marking and zoning the actual space of her body, and denoting presence like chalk outlines or a choreography diagram. The sienna, ochre, and umber oil crayons are rubbed into a waxy fictile residue that reveals tracks of activity, motion, footprints.

Most of the cave paintings are hung vertically from the ceiling, pierced with large metal grommets that liken the thick canvas to hide. Some are strung up on big hooks and another is fished through the rope of a laundry pulley as if it could be moved to alternately obscure the storefront window or the front door. For Wehrhahn, the portability of the paintings suggests a sort of nomadism. Approaching “LIVE/WORK” through the term’s associations with housing classifieds, real estate development, and gentrification, the relation to the figure to space in these works is also reflective of Wehrhahn’s considerations on how spaces like hers and others affect the surrounding neighborhood. Artists inevitably begin the neighborhood transformation that ultimately prices everyone out, and contributing, in some sense, “to our own extinction,” as she describes it.

Wehrhahn chooses to distribute the figurative cave paintings among a series of winsome, abstract, processed-based paintings — perhaps to play with another sort of artificial delineation. Works in this second set are all on roughly octagonal and ovoid-shaped wood panels. Shape with Holes (2015) bleeds matte black over primary blue and green oil paint, topped with shiny black enamel that crinkled as it set. The surface was then drilled with a hole saw — punching out a scatter plot of circular eyes that variously reveal the painted under-layers, the fresh wood beneath, or the wall behind. Table (2014) is coated in white milk paint and marked with similar drilled impressions, but with the addition of functional metal legs attached. Seat (2014) bridges these works with the Portable Cave Paintings by depicting a single chalk-lined seated figure — the aerial tracing of a rear end and legs Indian-style over the middle of the painting. Sitting at the center of the panel, you could form the shape by drawing a circle around yourself — turning at each of the interstices to continue the line. The scale of these works is roughly an arm’s length from the shape’s center, and the other abstract wood paintings, like Candle (2014), take the same scale that Seat seems to personalize.

Exhibiting her abstractions with the cave painting’s silhouettes leaves the trace of the figure on everything. That fugitive quality enables the works, when taken together, to achieve some of that distinctive sense of presence/absence felt when looking at cave art and other ancient cultural material. And ultimately, it’s a pleasurable turn of operations to see someone taking back space through painting. The paintings are a departure from Werhahn’s previous work; bright, acidly colored silkscreen prints with patterns and textures that tangle with simple, contentious conversational phrases. However, the basic operation is familiar as Wehrhahn has a capacity for extracting expressive and convincing results through outwardly simple gestures, and both series seem sprung from the same headlong mixture of psychic intensity and material ease.

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The brain is the king of the organs. The brain’s shape and structure define our humanity, though its method of governance over our bodies and actions remains largely a mystery. In “Belief System” at Soloway Gallery, Munro Galloway bares his brain. It’s not preserved in a jar for our scientific prodding; instead he slowly and intimately reveals it in glimpses, repetitions, and uncertainties. The accumulation of these revelations is confounding. “Belief System” includes works on canvas, drawings and books, with Galloway moving fluidly between different media. The canvases are oil and acrylic, inkjet prints, or some combination of both; the drawings layer collage, ink and gouache. Galloway has built out a low shelf to display three of the canvases and another purpose-built shelf shows the drawings. Interspersed among these drawings are books he has been making for a number of years. The works function together — a system — formed out of Galloway’s actions and use of material. The result is work that tantalizingly hovers between imagination and existence.

A walk through the canvases is a needed precursor to the drawings and books in the back room. The canvases appear graphic and accessible. In 65” x 50” (Lean Over Fat) (2014), abstract, bright yellow squares and lines are painted with a thick brush. Grey and white lines, squares and bell-like shapes are rendered more like sketches. “65”” was jotted down in the top left corner and “50”” in the bottom right. The size, a notation typically found on the back of the work, is put for any to see. The painting is almost stripped bare in its simplicity and openness — Galloway’s process seems clear, just from the title. 65” x 50” are its dimensions. The phrase “lean over fat” reverses a rule of oil painting where “fat” paint (as the name implies, there is a high oil-to-pigment ratio) is applied over “leaner” paint (with a lower oil-to-pigment ratio), as the latter dries more quickly than the former. By applying the oil lean over fat, the surface is more likely to crack. The dimensions on the canvas and the method by which the paint was applied in the title integrates the decisions made by Galloway during painting to the work as it is now apprehended by the viewer. The openness of the canvases insists on being taken at face value, but after looking at the shelf of books and drawings, they change.

The drawings are of brain slices — the shape of two spongy lobes repeats with permutations. All titled Brain Drawing, they are made on a variety of found paper, including color charts, takeout menus and exhibition flyers. Brain Drawing (2014), on the top left shelf, is ink and gouache drawn on ledger paper. The brain shape is drawn in black ink. Inside of this shape are two connected rectangles diagonally bisected by a line with bulbous ends. Galloway loosely applied blotches of black ink and washes of blue that permeate the shapes. More precisely, the black ink of the rectangles has been colored yellow. The identical shape of the yellow rectangles in both 65” x 50” (Lean Over Fat) and Brain Drawing imply a derivation. But, where typically a painting resolves or completes a drawing, after viewing Brain Drawing, 65” x 50” seems less finished. Instead, it looks like a memory or a strong impression of the drawing.

Galloway has made artist’s books for many years. Vessel States (2009) uses an art catalogue as its base. Galloway has left the captions (written in German) alone, but has also placed clunky and ill-fitting paper cutouts over the objects in the images. His collages are reproduced in black and white to make a seamless surface. A bronze or marble hand juts out from behind a paper covering — a bit of toe and a marble plinth are also visible. Again, there is interplay between revelation and mystery. In the books, this interaction forms the story as it unfolds in time as a narrative. The relationship between Brain Drawing and 65” x 50” is also a narrative, not linear as in the books, but circuitous with connections that fire like synapses.

Another Brain Drawing (2014) is drawn on a color chart. Black and red form a field for the white brain shape; there are scrawled nonsensical notations and circles of orange, pink, green, and yellow within the silhouetted organ. Despite these layers, the color chart comes through in different degrees of visibility. In 64” x 48” (Nervous System) (2014), Galloway has enlarged and inkjet-printed the same color chart onto a canvas on which he had already painted a scramble of different colors. It is difficult to tell the difference between paint and inkjet-print on the canvas. Galloway visually connects painting and inkjet-printing in 66.5” x 50.5” (2014). The image is barely a brain. Multi-colored lines jig and stutter like a printer running out of ink, but the canvas is not an inkjet, but a direct monoprint from another painted canvas. There is an increasingly complicated interplay of repetitions through the image of the brain and the use of materials and technology. These repetitions play with expectation — nothing can be assumed despite previous experience with other work in the show.

The materiality of the works displayed in “Belief System” is continually undercut by the intricacies of the works within the “system.” Simplicity hides complexity as a raw painting becomes a finished drawing. Abstract fragments are glimpses of an unknown more in a print from a painting. The paper of a drawing repeats as the pigment on a canvas. Art making intimately touches and pushes at something both fundamental and unknown within us: it is imagination mutating into existence and mystery founding belief.

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The press release for “Kristan Kennedy Meets a Clock,” at Brooklyn’s Soloway gallery, defiantly proclaims, “All the paintings have been made, even the embarrassing ones.” T.R.N.T. (2014) is one of those on view that refers less explicitly to bodies, though all the works are rather haptic. Kennedy, a Portland-based artist, here nods to textiles and, more, to gendered divisions of labor. After staining and collaging on sheets of linen with ink, enamel, aluminum or other materials, Kennedy throws her paintings into the washing machine to age them via an aleatory gesture weighted with feminist overtones. Her mark making owes something to Expressionism, but she has rinsed Romantic melodrama from the whole endeavor, leaving exuberance and snarky fun in its wake. The resulting brushy and weathered images are hung unstretched and loose — others are draped over an austere brass armature that hugs the wall before projecting into the gallery’s space. There’s something sensuous in T.R.N.T.’s splayed diptych, conjoined at the bottom by a tenuous connection. On the left, the painting is scrawled with dense black lines like manically ruled notebook paper; on the left, curving and looping gestures in on a yellow field serve as more contemplative counterpoints. The piece droops, stretching languidly. It’s smart and erotic and not too pithy. Certainly there’s no reason to be embarrassed of it.  NOAH DILLON

Kristan Kennedy, T.R.N.T., 2014. Sumi, dye, gesso, aluminum, enamel on linen, 48 x 73 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Soloway Gallery.

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