January 16 to February 22, 2014

303 Gallery
507 West 24th Street
New York, (212) 255-1121

In Eileen Myles’s autobiographical essay, “Everyday Barf,” the poet writes, “I don’t mind today, but the everyday makes me barf.” For contemporary New York feminist artists like Eileen Myles and Sue Williams, daily life after 9/11 can seem particularly revolting, and, on a bad day, impossible to stomach. Nevertheless, Williams’s new paintings (all made in 2013), now on view at 303 Gallery, felicitously work alongside the hate that breeds disgust and contempt. In her own satirical style, Williams speaks back to the revulsion prompted by the incendiary political climate that followed September 11. The explicit political critique embedded in the work’s content and titles revisits some of the material mined in her 2010 show, curated by Nate Lowman, Al-Quaeda is the CIA, and her contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an all-too convincing pornographic puddle of vomit titled The Sweet and Pungent Smell of Success. In the abstract paintings of WTC, WWIII, Couch Size, the push-purge impulse is no less present, as Williams addresses fears of flying debris, dizzying nausea, and the urgent, unexpected libidinal sparks that occupy post-9/11 life.

The most dazzling painting of the six large color-saturated canvasses, Philip Zelikow, Historian (titled after the executive director of the 9/11 commission) expands upon Williams’s career long preoccupation with violence, astonishment, and flight. The painting, a cascading flood of variegating intensities, moves from varying shades of sea-foam, spring, and blue-greens; as these colors gush from some invisible sphincter across the canvas, they precipitate what one critic referred to as “Pepto-Bismal pinks.” The painting also calls to mind Mary Heilmann’s Pink Trance (2010). Unlike Williams’s Philip Zelikow, Heilmann’s Pink Trance  embraces the sleepy slow-motion drag of a drug like Dramamine whereas Williams’s pink tones carry an inflammatory charge designed to arouse and excite; in Philip Zelikow, these erratic pinks verge on magenta, and seem especially explosive as they jump alongside contrasting shades of electric teal and popping peony yellow.

Philip Zelikow revels in the fact that fascination can be an anchor, a way of connecting to political history, or the alienating televisual spectacle of those two flaming icons, the Twin Towers. These paintings animate through abstraction the aura of wartime tumult as they dramatize the violent collisions between the personal and the political. How does anyone internalize a historical event on the global scale of 9/11? Williams’s paintings inhabit this zone of lingering stupefaction as she revisits the World Trade Center and the disorienting swarms of historical precarity which surround it. Departing from her previous and more condensed, comic abstractions, her new paintings have dropped the sharp contours that separate shape from action, intent from effect. Trauma renders rage and distress by refusing to distinguish between them. In Retire in Fla., smoke from a firework, or an explosion dissolves the edges of emotions. There’s a recognizable heart at the matter of such queer emanations, but the roiling matter that moves out of the frame is fugitive, and evades capture. Recalling September 11 in the presence of these works, one may immediately remember that the event and its aftermath was a mess, to put it lightly. To consider the catastrophe in hindsight as WWIII, as the title of the show suggests, is not a hyperbole, for the circumstances and the stakes were real, but, at the time, abstract. Who was it even happening to? New Yorkers, or the United States? Ten plus years later, Williams’s new works reflect the anticipation of impending war while transposing it into the present moment, without sentimentality or patriotism.

Amid the melting streams of candy-colored arcs, there lies an intuitive and hard-won set of tensions exhibited in every canvas, most quizzically reflected in Otis. The bending buildings in the background scattered among dildonic shapes in the foreground coalesce in a frenzied landscape where dimensions, as in Wackyland, give way to jet streams of frothy colors whose chafing in turn produces even stranger monuments. Otis, presumably the teal moose in the middle, opens his eyes wide, but not necessarily as if he were taking it all in; his gaze suggests the quagmire of just being, especially when you’ve lost track of your emergency exits, and you can’t find the bathroom.

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November 15 to December 21, 2013

Jack Hanley Gallery
327 Broome Street
New York City, 646-918-6824

NEW/USED/WET/BROKEN, the debut solo exhibition of Jeff Williams at Jack Hanley Gallery, features work that tests its own structural or material vulnerabilities. Williams, an artist who divides his time between Brooklyn and Austin, Texas, highlights and isolates various scientific processes behind physical degeneration. His intricate sculptural installations (all 2013) are composed as chemistry and physics experiments. Going beyond illustrating the effects of age and erosion, many of his works activate entropic processes and house the ingredients of their own undoing. The show consists of eight pieces ranging from a twenty-foot monumental steel column to a photo printed on newsprint, to floor sculptures, wall propositions, and video.

In #13, a two-foot-long aluminum I-beam protruding from the wall about four feet off the ground, looks sleek with a single buxom wine glass hanging upside down by a wire stemware rack attached to its underside. The I-beam is bent just enough to perfectly curve around a one-inch-thick threaded metal rod that buttresses it from the floor. Williams has coated the wine glass with liquid gallium, a camouflaged threat, as gallium’s smooth silvery sheen mimics the surface of the aluminum. Gallium and aluminum are in the same periodic group (called Group 13), but gallium “attacks” aluminum—it is so highly corrosive to some metals that it can weaken or dissolve them. In #13, these elemental enemies are held together in risky proximity so that the glass endangers its own aluminum support.

Oxidation Table is a six-foot-long metal fabrication table that was found by the artist this summer on the Skowhegan campus in Maine. It’s composed of a rebar frame supporting 18 rusty steel slats, upright and spaced at regular intervals. The table’s heavily rusted surface is friable and brittle and the top edges of the metal slats have been eaten away into craggy, fingerlike formations. The rows of steel rails resemble miniature ruins or models of early Richard Serras. Three slats are so warped by corrosion that they no longer lay flat in the table’s slotted base, but wrench upward into dramatic arcs.

Multiple times a day, gallery personnel spray the table with a solution of hydrogen peroxide so that the piece continues to degenerate over the course of the exhibition. Because the slats are made of untreated metal, the surface begins to bubble right away and one can watch the oxidation process happen within minutes. The work spotlights the high degree of technology built into everyday materials and brings to attention the fact that most of the metal in our built environments is chemically engineered (galvanized, coated, blued) to resist the natural processes of oxidation and material decay. On a subsequent visit to the gallery, I found that a large section had broken off one of the rails. As the structural integrity is further compromised, the table becomes a kind garden to rust and its rich, powdery red-oxide pigments. Flaking pieces of rust that range between Indian and Venetian reds, siennas, and umbers continually reveal a fresh layer of cool gray steel underneath, waiting to be disintegrated.

Cibolo Creek is a floor sculpture that juxtaposes old and new, and human interference with natural processes. The work consists of a shiny yellow blowtorch fitted into an upright steel slab, facing a limestone fossil—a pairing that bridges the primordial with the contemporary and creates a strange visual approximation for a large span of time. The opposition of these two objects also plays with thermal decomposition. According to gallery staff, Williams lights the torch during impromptu performances in the space, exploiting a chemical reaction that happens when the limestone is heated. Breaking the 60 million-year-old Texas fossil into calcium oxide and carbon dioxide, the flame causes it to sputter and spew ancient debris onto the gallery floor, later cleaned up by gallery staff.

Chemical reactions and other unseen mechanisms yield striking physical changes in raw materials. In his art practice Williams repeatedly asks “Why?” all the way down to the atomic level. The artist’s embedded research adds conceptual drama and playfulness to works that are formally inscrutable. There’s a wonder and sensitivity in testing a material’s range and resiliency—that aluminum, for example, can be formed into a weight-bearing I-beam, or broken down by another metal or, in another sculpture, extruded as a foam. Williams is attentive to details, like the exposed bluish seams that bisect each of the two twenty-foot-long torqued building ties in Column, or Cibolo Creek’s interdependent, propped components, which seem to perfectly anticipate one another. Delicate decisions like these ensure that the sculptures’ experimental and procedural components are not deadened, but incredibly vivid.

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