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

Installation shot of the exhibition under review. Courtesy of Slag Contemporary

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.

Claudia Chaseling, Infiltration, 2012. Ink egg tempera and oil on canvas, 78-3/4 x 59 inches. Courtesy of Slag Contemporary

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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Greg Lindquist, Thanatopsis Revisited (Island, Sanctuary, The Physical World), 2011, Oil and acrylic on wall. Courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery

The soft glowing orange of Lindquist’s first wall painting in You are Nature appears to take its slanted oblong shape from a sunbeam, one which must at a particular time of day stretch across the white of one of the gallery’s pillars. Standing marker-like amid the paintings on canvas which make up the better part of the show, the wall-work signals what is for this artist a new and successful engagement with color: evident everywhere in distinctive greens, yellows, turquoises and vermillion. The wall piece is equally emblematic, however, of a pervasive restlessness that runs like a current through the exhibition. Lindquist’s works often suggest origins in a questioning, even uneasy, relationship to the conventions of painting and sometimes even a paradoxical desire to take the traditional attributes of the form somewhere outside the constraints of the canvas altogether. The resulting works feel like active meditations on the nature of the pictorial surface, played out through layered depictions of earth-sites, still-lifes, water-scapes and screens.

Accompanying the new spectrum of color in these works is a broader range of subject matter, and a more varied approach to painterly execution. Lindquist’s previous work has most often addressed the life-cycles of the urban landscape, the processes of construction and decay visible in the landmarks and anonymous buildings of our human environment. Past imagery has focused on factories in ruin, such as those found along the Brooklyn waterfront, depicted with clarity in photo-silhouette,usually from the easily-read perspective of an earth-bound passer-by.

Greg Lindquist, What Lies Beneath (The Galaxy of Space and Time), 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery

The current exhibition takes the project past the city limits and what feels like off the ground through several outdoor scenarios and underwater vistas. What Lies Beneath (The Galaxy of Space and Time), (2012) is among the most striking works in the show. It depicts, in an almost apocalyptic color scheme (from rusts to day-glo orange) Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. While the iconic forms of the earthwork are unmistakably articulated in the midground of the painting, they are partially obscured by a tempest of brushstrokes in the foreground, and then again towards the top of the canvas in an inexplicable burst of bright – as suggestive of an atomic bomb as the sun – which is left to drip pure whiteness straight down the otherwise recessive space. Two outer asymmetrical bands running alongside the canvas suggest a view from a window, its slanting angle playing against the picture plane. The viewpoint from which this scene is drawn is otherwise uncertain. The scale and proximity to the subject is oddly ambiguous despite a striving for representational rigor and, as in the case of many paintings here, almost disembodiesthe vantage point.

Central to the strength of these works is their painterly experimentation. By this I don’t simply mean a more physical sense of the medium, but more specifically a resonant relationship built between color, application and subject matter – a rapprochement of form to content. The grayscale precision of Lindquist’s earlier work is now, for example, translated into color. This tone-by-tone chromatic amplification yields powerful imagistic presence, as with the mass of coral-yellow in Phosphorescent Cloud (2012) which seems to be actively emerging from a depth of ocean turquoise. Particularly effective is the way Lindquist constructs form through staggered layers of color, as in Meditation/ Mediation (2012), where an entity of unknown identity, perhaps an old wood piling or a geyser seen from above, is built-up from crisply-outlined modulations of the same silhouette. Time Has Fallen Asleep (2012) is a poetic image of a plant in its vertical and reverse form; its delicate branches touching, hiding and interrupting each other in glazes of yellow and purple transparency. This superimposition effect visually references stencil or silkscreen techniques. It brings to mind a step-by-step process of image making, and by extension serves as a reminder of the selective and successive properties of perception. The two paintings of actual screens which appear in the show – one of an iPhone, the other of an airplane TV monitor – figure in this context not as the odd-ones-out in a slate of landscape paintings, but as further exploration into the mediated, even pixilated, nature of so much contemporary visual experience.

A key concern for Lindquist seems to be the expression of a kind of “substance” of depicted space. Light, distance, water and atmosphere are given special care, often felt out in fine spackles which form a pigmented fog. The technique is in itself beautiful, and indicates a draftsman’s concerns with the pictorial expansiveness possible within illusionistic parameters. It can also, however, on occasion lend a sort of “faux-finish” quality to the work, like a polishing touch used to complete a painting. Coming from a skilled, thoughtful painter, this veneer-like aspect in some of the works reveals a sense of vulnerability, a lack of faith in the communicative power of the image prior to its blurring finish.

The various framing devices seen in many of the works – nearly all of which are inventive and formally successful – similarly suggest apprehension about the emotionally direct implications of the face-on picture plane. In Apnea (2012) the mythical image of a free-diver immersed in blue is offset by a darkened half-border, suggestive of a screen-shot or underwater frame. Although the finished work is evocative and resolved, the image unfettered by device might have been more to the point. The cerebral, even aloof, quality of much of Lindquist’s work is alternately distancing and intriguing, as it seems to be indicative of a skepticism of the form built-in to its own execution. It’s a crucial issue for a dedicated painter to address, and the strength and charge evident in the current show suggests very good things will come from its resolution.

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Catherine Howe, Night Painting (Phoenix), 2011. Oil and beeswax on linen, 40 x 40 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery, NY

This sampling of contemporary incarnations of abstract painting by eight artists, all of whom are women, evokes a wide range of painterly associations. Strikingly, however, almost all of the works forego the traditional (for abstraction) flat treatment of the picture plane in favor of the kinds of depth inherent to illusionistic space – implying, whether tacitly or overtly, an engagement with depiction.

In the warp-and-woof play of Canan Tolan’s work, for example, a plaid pattern is destabilized by contrasting surface yellows and recessive darks. Carrie Yamaoka’s resin-slick surface of even deeper blues and blacks is alternately inky, cosmic and oceanic in effect. Amy Ellingson and Lisa Corinne Davis employ diagrammatic sensitivity in their constructions of geometric forms. Dannielle Tegeder’s fresh take on Suprematist forms has them ascending towards the extended field of a secondary canvas while Rebecca Smith’s metal wall sculptures suggest forms slipping off the grid in an almost liquid gesture of melting and submersion.

The chaotic underpinnings of abstract process are visible in the wrestling-with-formlessness evident in both Andrea Belag’s big-stroke chromatic transitions and Catherine Howe’s deliciously sloppy tableau of ill-contained areas of color and bursts of materiality.

The exhibition remains on view through Friday, July 29.  There is a closing reception for the show as part of Chelsea Art Walk 2011 on Thursday, July 28, 5-8 PM

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The leading Puvis scholar discusses her 40 years’ work on the French master culminating in the publication of a long-awaited catalogue raisonné. Interview by CHRISTINA KEE

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Poor Fisherman, 1881. Oil on canvas, 59-7/8 x 74-7/8 inches. Musée d'Orsay. ABP 272

You write in the introduction that your research on Puvis began–  close to 40 years ago–  with the image of The Poor Fisherman. How did this catalogue raisonné come to be?
I was interested in tracking down this odd painting because it didn’t fit in with anything else I really knew in 19th-century painting. It was just curiosity to begin with – Puvis’ name cropped up everywhere, so I started to try and find out who had anything to say, and would it help me figure out this painting? And in fact it became more elusive, because there was too much said but not enough that was really explained. Had I known this at the outset, I might have said “Ok, your curiosity won’t be sated…” and then proceeded a bit differently.At that time, however, I applied for and got a Fulbright to study Puvis and I simply started figuring out what works I could find – without a set idea of what I was going to write about. During that first year, when I was very energetic, I was actually looking in the phone books in Paris, and seeing if there were any Puvis family. I found some, and I started writing very polite French letters of inquiry. Basically at a point I just struck it rich. Many of the Puvis relatives were curious about why I would be interested; this was in the mid sixties, no one had ever approached them. They were sort of intrigued by me, I think, and would say “cousin so-and-so” might have something, so I just began to take inventories of various holdings. At the time I didn’t have enough money to even photograph all the pictures, I made little drawings, so as not to waste film.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and Muses, ca.1884-9. Oil on canvas, 36-1/2 x 91 inches. Art Institute of Chicago. ABP 304

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Portrait of the Artist (unfinished), ca. 1883-7. Oil on canvas, 24 x 18-1/2. Musée d'Orsay, on loan to the Musée de Pacardie. ABP 316

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Medrie MacPhee, Big Bang, 2010. Oil on canvas, 64 x 84 inches. Courtesy of Van Lintel Gallery, New York.

What it Is – the title of Medrie MacPhee’s recent show at Von Lintel – was fitting for an artist with a career-long preoccupation with the slippery identities of painted forms. Over the past years MacPhee has exhibited abstract paintings that are nonetheless evocative of some specific, if indeterminate, time and place.  Forms feel rendered rather than invented in her work, and distinct spaces are suggested by horizon-like lines.

The dense, challenging paintings that comprise the new show mark a dramatic departure. In these mostly larger-scale canvasses the separate shapes, or “futuristic species”, as the artist has playfully described them, of earlier pictures have been brought together en masse to collide, overlap and interact in scenes of barely controlled abundance. The approach builds forcefully from the abstract/figurative tensions established in the previous works, and the multiple forms are more engaging than the solitary ones to an almost proportionate degree.

The works in this show differ in character, effect and intention, while united in their elusiveness. In Big Bang (2010) jagged shapes press uncomfortably past the picture plane, right-angled items stack and teeter to a compositional point of near-breakdown. Float (2009) similarly depicts a collection of forms either emerging or being submerged amidst piles of wreckage. Further comparison to anything architectural falls short, however: the configurations of parts depicted in these paintings are in no way earthbound or materially stable. Not only has gravity given way to a point where questions of support and suspension are non-applicable, but the very planes of the matter depicted often give way to contrasting underpainting of atmospheric blues and grays, to disorienting effect. Strong dramatic light unexpectedly strikes some forms and softly passes through others.

But rather than allowing us to get lost in the rich ambiguities these elaborate set ups offer, MacPhee seems insistent questioning just what is being looked at in these pictures? The response is rich in adjectives and short on nouns. The seemingly discrete parts that make up these works have clear and specific characteristics–hard, transparent, soft, columnar, etc. – and yet remain unidentifiable as any known object outside their painted world. As viewers we have the distinct sense of looking at real, raw materials in a pre-named state. Surveying these paintings recalls the tasks of early philosophy, laboriously weighing questions of attribute against those of essence. MacPhee’s unusual, even jarring, palette becomes significant in this context – purples, acidic greens and reds are laid on, label-like, to objects that still stubbornly resist definition. The world presented by the artist is one keenly, even threateningly, felt – if not necessarily comprehended.

Medrie MacPhee, Float, 2009. Oil on canvas, 60 x 78 inches. Courtesy of Van Lintel Gallery, New York.

It was instructive to learn from the artist that this recent series was sparked in part by time spent in Berlin, where the marks of a complex history are materially palpable. Without being too literal about it, the influence of the city supports the impression that the laboratory-like experimentation of the earlier works has given way to a powerful response to human-scaled questions of construction, anxiety, momentum and collapse.  Also cited was a growing concern with the “hard-core unreality” of the current news media, in which the facts surrounding oil spills and economic recoveries are altered wildly on a daily basis, and where the exact point of crisis is always uncertain. In MacPhee’s new paintings there is a distinct sensation of being up against a reality that we cannot name. These remarkable works stand out as a brave response to locating subject matter in a world where the simplest “is” can be difficult to grasp

installation shot of the exhibition under review

Deitch Studios, the waterfront second-space of Deitch Projects, succeeds in practice where many other galleries do in name only as a true “project room”;  a kind of well-funded playhouse where shows are chosen with an eye towards bold moves, experimentation, and flirtation with possible failure. The current exhibition Josh Smith: On the Water—youthfully energetic and built up from a premise akin to a dare—neatly fits the bill.

The show is comprised of forty-seven five-by-four feet paintings executed in measured intervals directly on the gallery wall.  Even without the press release telling us that the paintings were done in what must have been a hectic three and a half days, we can sense the tension between the demands of a challenge—producing a certain amount of paintings in a given time—and its material outcome.  Speed is as much an ingredient in the resulting works as paint and drywall, and the forty-seven paintings evidence their hasty coming-to-be in swingy strokes, easy one-form motifs, and unfussy transparent washes that glow with the white beneath.  The artist has continued his practice of working with simple and central images, and the paintings present variations on three basic motifs; a fish, a leaf, and the artist’s own child-like signature. The latter is often riffed to a point of pure abstraction, producing, quite winningly, works that look like perfect symbols of “painting”—like objects that might be the subject of wry commentary from gallery-going characters in New Yorkercartoons.

The best works are vibrant and fun, and show the chops of a painter who takes delight in straightforward, rambunctious picture making. (The direct application of paint-on-wall viscerally recalls the childhood sensation of dragging a crayon off-limit onto forbidden surfaces). Exuberance happily trumps strategy, and in its strongest moments the exhibition suggests the workings of a mischievous sprite from a rowdy night before.  The constraints of the chosen rectangular format and the placement of these paintings also work to activate the imagination, as the loopy strokes of the works pressing tensely up against their “frame” remind us that the only thing containing these paintings are spiderweb-thin pencil lines.  There is the hint that the images could, if released, extend indefinitely onto whatever two-dimensional opportunity might present itself.

But Smith doesn’t reach the high-mark of producing a knock-out show of one-session paintings. The risky premise certainly adds energy to the enterprise, but not an exemption from the basic rule that weaker paintings will bring down stronger ones, whatever good/bad painting criteria one might be using. A few of the paintings succumb to repetition and fatigue, begging the question of whether the artist might have arranged it to have a little less painting and a little more time to tip the scales in his favour.  There is a pervasive sense of arbitrariness throughout On the Water. Questions of “why three and half days?” or “why 47 paintings?” appear to have no better answer than “why not?” The strict use of three unrelated motifs also seems ill-considered, given that the more complex forms clearly yield more interesting results, as with the sinuous catfish subjects delineated in slithers of electric pinks and greens.  The “signature” paintings, basic doodles of “Josh Smith,” are simply weak unless pushed to abstraction: egocentric without being individually expressive, devoid of content without being formally interesting.  Even a slight departure from this system of rather dull personal symbols could have provided a range of armatures strong enough to support this artist’s impressive energies and considerable talents.

From left to right: Chalk Farm, (2009, oil on canvas, 39 x 34 inches;) Poires Noires (2009, oil and rayon string on canvas, 66 x 56 inches;) Jelly (2008, oil on canvas, 25 x 18 inches;); Drapery, after Yves Saint Laurent's coffin cover, (2009, cloth, dried wheat, spraypaint, table, 24 x 60 inches); sand painting on the floor, colored sand, 70 x 66 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Ruthless in Chalk Farm, Allison Katz’s solo exhibition at Battat Contemporary, is a collection of handmade pieces – a yellow wooden snake, a wheat-sheaf-laden funeral cloth, a still-life executed in sand – and several exceptional paintings. With a strength of execution that overpowers any complaint of arbitrariness, Katz conjures forms and images that are at once beautiful and funny, familiar and strange. In the context of this show they possess a sadness as well, as it is quietly communicated that the Ruth in the show’s title is the artist’s late grandmother. Although this exhibition consists of a wide range of works done over the past two years it is purely, and unapologetically, commemorative in spirit.

Katz’s paintings often puzzle before they reward. With daunting diversity her works range from still-lifes to abstractions to ambitious tableaux that take their compositional cue from collage.Cactus is a simple potted plant, beefed-up with impasto brushwork; Chalk Farm poetically depicts, in what might be called a folk-cubist manner, a sprite-like character awash in his pastel-block surroundings. This variety would be an obstacle to consistency, were it not that all of the works display a uniform clarity, conviction, and uncanny presence often disproportionate to their scale.

Egypt’s Grapes, one of Katz’s strongest paintings, consists of an outlined female form poised on the edge of a crimson canvas, one leg playfully, longingly, extended towards a doubly-rendered moon. Oddly reminiscent of both Pompeii and Picasso, this compelling drama of figure and ground formally plays out the actions of a heroine literally embodying the substance of her surroundings, defining the center of her own specific universe.

Painting, for this artist, is not a rarefied act of translation, but a continuous process of engagement with the material world. This workmanlike approach, which has little use for hierarchy, allows her, without fuss or pretense, to introduce three-dimensional elements into the gallery space. A replica of Yves-St-Laurent’s funeral cloth, for example, golden and strewn with green wheat-sheaves, gently allows melancholy associations to infuse the plant imagery that crops up in a number of other works in the show.

Allison Katz, Poires Noires, 2009. Oil and rayon string on canvas, 66 x 56 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

With the logic of a synaesthete, for whom numbers, names and concepts can be equated with distinct sensations of color or sound, Katz displays a fascination with the impact of charged pairings of painterly parts. The curious dark fruits – think Roman Mosaic or late Derain –  that figure in several graphic still-life works are a simple combination of “black” and “pears”, yet operate as dense, if indirect, symbols of sensual vitality, loss and death. It is oddly helpful when viewing Katz’s work simply to name and list the visible configurations that occur: plant/ pattern; pears made in paint /pears made in sand; black fruit/ black silhouette; head in profile/ swimming swans;  yellow snake/ yellow stripe, and so on. It is an impressive culmination of motifs, bringing to light in a pictorial stream-of-consciousness connections and sensations that would otherwise be lost. In Katz’s profusion of images it is the black border, the dark fruit, the shadowed field and the space of the tomb that sustain a quiet note of mourning throughout. Katz never seems to forget that hers is a medium inextricably linked to conjuring that which no longer is, and in Ruthless in Chalk Farm she has established a vital and inspiring memorial.

Exhibition Two
Fort Zachary Taylor State Park
March 1 – April 18, 2009

Ludwika Ogorzelec, from "Space Crystallization" cycle, 2009. 4-km cellophane line, coral stones, variable dimensions. Photos by Karley Klopfenstein, courtesy Sculpture Key West.

Strong, spirited, and brought to life with industry and intelligence, this year’s Sculpture Key West exhibition offered an engaging sampling of contemporary works. Held for the past nine years in its current form, this ambitious outdoor exhibition occurs in two main exhibition sites on the tropical island of Florida’s Key West and features the work of local, national and international artists. This year’s head curator was Shamim Momin of the Whitney Museum, who worked closely with Exhibitions Director Karley Klopfenstein and a small jury to shape what proved to be a diverse show of 32 works from 37 artists. Sculpture Key West’s approach has always been brave: the artists have only a few days – working in the heat, wind and rain – to execute their pieces, which are then expected to remain intact, or at least onsite, until being dismantled two months later. The drama inherent to such a logistically challenging process is palpable in the final result, and lends the show an energy, unity and sheer like-ability foreign to most group exhibitions.

This is not to say that every piece was a success. Some sculptures suffered in the elements, a small few were not able be on view for the duration of the show, and a couple of the pieces seemed indicative of nothing so much as an artist cracking under  pressure and leaving the site in a tantrum. Within an otherwise overwhelmingly successful exhibition, however, these minor setbacks served as material proof of Sculpture Key West’s admirable acceptance of risk as a necessary factor in the creation of serious, exciting work.

One of the strongest elements of the show was the considered placement of works within the very different main sites of the Gardens at West Martello Tower and Fort Zachary Taylor State Park. Although both venues center around nineteenth-century military fortifications, the Gardens are a series of cloistered green spaces set amid meandering brickwork, and Fort Taylor Zachary Park is a treeless plain by the water’s edge. The contrast in setting was used to exceptional effect, literally doubling the possibilities of an already broadly defined medium.

The visual competition of the Gardens at the West Martello Site, with its profusion of outrageous tropical flora,  was so intense as to have necessitated, for most artists, an unconventional sculptural approach -  that of camouflage and surprise. Looming in the treetops, Ludwica Ogorzelec’s Space Crystallization (all works 2009) is the result of impressive technique of woven plastic film. This curious structure extends and falls into space, held in tension with knots and weights that exploit the flex and pull of an unexpected material. Densely translucent, Ogorzelec’s piece requires a slow looking-into in order to be properly seen, and defies instinctive attempts to assess properties of mass, material and contour. The oversized crocheted patterns of Liliana Crespi’s Captured, slung amid the garden foliage, similarly challenge conventional readings, constituted as they are by rope and holes, and having little in the way of weight and form in any regular sense. Bringing to mind the toils of a modern-day Arachne, Crespi’s piece elegantly alludes to the tense relationship between the natural and man-made, all the while echoing the concentrically unfurling patterns of the buds and blossoms close-by. Jamey Grimes’ carefully crafted, corrugated plastic work Between Space,which would almost be too smooth a read in a gallery space, is set here to magical effect under the latticework of a bower where it is forced to do all-out battle with the brilliance and shadow-silhouette of tropical light.

The impact of these works is intentionally subtle, but sufficient for sharpening the senses. Pay attention could have been the curatorial mantra for this section of the show, and the directive was acted out in the work of Karen McCoy and Robert Carl, whose “listening trumpets” randomly prompt visitors throughout the site to tune-in to the sensorial possibilities of their fantastical surroundings.

Karlis Rekevics Untitled 2009. Plaster, variable dimensions.

The Fort Zachary venue, bordered by brick and ocean, is infused with that potent blend of the paradisiacal and militaristic encountered throughout the tropics in places of past dispute and defense. Many of the works on this site responded to the sense of threat intrinsic to the presence of the fort, other to the site’s identity as a landing place for immigrants arriving by sea. Even the more lighthearted works suggest – like the landscape that is both holiday-like and vaguely ominous – that things are not always as they appear. The sculptures are here set out along what felt like and emotional scale and viewers making their way along the windswept space encounter a progression of play, puzzlement, unease and awe in what amounted to a very moving experience.

Towards the beginning of this trek are a number of pieces that delight and startle with a mischievous sensibility. Diana Shpungin’s work Perfect Disconnect appear s to be two ordinary payphones, except that they are impossibly fused, and emit the clicks and dial tones of a doubly-confounded communication. Jackson Martin’s Rooted is a northern evergreen dwarfed within an enormous burlap root-sac, and while looking like a bit of landscaping gone wrong, the piece acts as a succinct expression of the anxieties surrounding issues of upheaval and belonging. Anja Marais’ False Security is just that: a hot-pink trailer suggestive of a life-size Barbie at play, until a peek inside reveals a surreal alternative. Owen Mundy and Joelle Dietrick’s curved mirror placed against the dazzling shoreline takes the form of a light-apparition, a teasing mirage.

Moving out from the populated section of the park, the works become more structured, almost monumental. These pieces are bold enough to stand up to the starker surroundings, and don’t shy away either from tackling themes of beauty, message and form. Paige Pedri’sEmancipation, placed right against the water’s edge, is a statement of strength both in the abstract and the actual. A soaring tower of corresponding forms, Pedri’s work spoke simultaneously of patterns of flight, a struggle against gravity, and the tangible ambition of an artist truly engaged. Equally expansive, thought oriented along the horizontal plane, was the reflective 250’ ramp engineered by Steven Durow and Jessica Cappiello that charted a slow and steady ascent towards the blue it mirrored above. Lori Nozick built an irresistible, if somewhat arbitrary, structure from pure salt bricks, and Nathaniel Hein and Jennifer Gonzales fashioned a heart-wrenching piece, in which the plastic-bag panels of a greenhouse allowed tender young shoots just enough air to sprout, only to then suffocate.

The most successful sculptures stood out in their ability to draw complex emotional resonance from simple material statements. Lauren P. McAloon’s Threshold is a hauntingly beautiful gathering of tall bamboo “flutes” that sing, whistle and sigh almost unceasingly into a relentless sea-wind. Completed with the worn-rudders of Cuban chug boats, the plaintive cry of McAloon’s work isn’t subtle – but its effectiveness is undeniable.  Julia Handshue’s piece,Release/Recovery, involves the dissemination of exquisite, serial-numbered, porcelain pods throughout both sites for the purposes of discovery and re-documentation. Though cooly-executed, the piece presents in perfect miniature an object-cycle of lost-and-found, stirring unexpected associations of delight and regret.

Karlis Rekevic’s work consists of white plaster structures that allude, obliquely, to nearby architectural features. In a sophisticated play of multiple forms, Rekevic’s piece simultaneously builds up and subverts an individualized system of construction, in which the forces of assertion, recession, weight and support are in constant play. More than any other artist in the show, this work seemed involved with sculpture as a fully three-dimensional phenomenon, as opposed to a sophisticated form of communication through object means. It is remarkable, however, that nearly all of the works in the show seemed to possess their own internal dignity; expressing within these challenging conditions that the act of sculpture is one that is uncertain, vulnerable, and at its best heroic.

Bentley Goes to War 2009 oil on canvas

Clintel Steed’s powerful new paintings are among the best works on view at this year’s youthful, bustling – and very fun – Bridge Art Fair. Grouped generously in Mark Borghi’s gallery space, Steed’s large canvasses are a perfect fit for the setting; arresting and sustaining as they do even the most restless of gazes. With strong color, decisive brushstrokes and exuberant frame-pushing compositions, Steed unfolds complex scenes taken mainly from his own surroundings. Frontal-Pass andTriple Play are especially eye-catching, and depict, among the miscellany of the studio, computers set to show internet porn. The handling of the images on the screens is deftly energetic, both pixilated and painterly, but no more interesting than the rest of the paintings which exhibit expertly maneuvered passages of mud-tones slipping thickly into bright hues, and structural expanses of pink taking on blush-inducing figurative presences. The works suggest the instincts and intellect of a painter who thrives on visual overstimulation, and for whom all forms of seeing can be a bit of a turn-on.

Triple Play 2009 oil on canvas

Bentley Goes to War 2009 oil on canvas

Zach Harris, Option Eye 2007-2008. Acrylic and wood, 30-3/4 x 22-1/4 x 1 inches. Images courtesy of Max Protetch Gallery

Requiem Reversals, Zach Harris’s first solo show at Max Protetch Gallery, is a curious yet oddly potent collection of works. Evading strict role definitions of painting and relief, Harris has crafted hybrids of the two that combine bold, otherworldly imagery with ornate sculptural supports. These dense aggregates of geometric patterning, Utopian landscape and delicate filigree invite extended contemplation, and at their best function as powerful modern-day secular icons.

Like the Buddhist devotional paintings Harris often quotes, his works link pictorial production to specific meditative states. The landscapes he depicts are purely internal in origin, and together operate as forms of visual notation from a disembodied vantage point. Despite the dramatic spatial recession of works like Option Eye, for example, in which colorful blocks crowd row behind infinite row, the structural components of Harris’ scenes seem to inhabit a symbolic, rather than a spatial, realm. Conventional readings of “above” and “below”, of north, south, east and west are confounded in these panels by the integration of patterned motifs – diamond shapes and curlicues – that resist any such perspectival pre-conditions. The improbable worlds that Harris presents are less pictures of places than visual destinations within elaborate structures, guiding the eye ever-centerwards.

Harris establishes a very fluid relationship between the three-dimensional patterning of the framework and the seductive scenes within. The conversation that results taps the evocative nature of pattern itself: beyond the beautiful and decorative, simple geometric motifs can also be highly charged, and even emotive. In Sunrises 88, for example, layers of plywood have been built up around the periphery of the surface of the work, then cut away in lateral curves to yield a formation of luminous petal-shapes. The effect creates a sculptural counterpart to the newly radiant light evoked by the title, and to the glowing shapes centrally depicted. Conversely, the jagged external forms of Venus Flytrap physically convey the latent danger of a sharp edge before the moment of an ill-fated touch.

There is, however, a danger in this system of tactile and imagistic mix-and-match.  A couple of works, like History Painting Dream, for example, suffer from an incoherent gathering of sources, amounting to a collision of images within ill-defined parameters. Clearly, the playful maze-work and distinctive motifs that elsewhere create a strong formal presence can be cartoonish and contrived when mishandled. But it was my experience, surprisingly, that these less-powerful works strengthen the overall show: in Harris’ unusual recipe it helps to see what doesn’t work to appreciate what does. The potentially uncomfortable melding of disparate elements that his approach entails is a tricky business, and, as with an alchemist at work, there is no guarantee that a valuable substrate will result from the mix. This play of unseen stakes is, perhaps, part of what makes Harris’ concretized variations of internalized form so compelling.