Third Floor (55)

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Nature’s Poetry

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! —William Wordsworth, The world is too much with us   No time to turn at Beauty’s glance, And watch her…

Waterline

The installation of renowned English artist Francis Cape’s piece Waterline (2006) in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, featured seventeen framed photographs hung above a wainscot of ochre-painted paneling. The photographs were taken in New Orleans on November 6th, 2005, two months after Hurricane Katrina, in the towns of Gentilly and St. Roch in central New Orleans. Cape…

Deformed and Distended: Space Knotted in Circles and Squares

A Lissajous figure, framed within its invisible rectangular confinement, hovers on the top left corner of a canvas. Painted against an indigo-blue background in bleeding tints of white, the figure—a two-dimensional representation of parametric equations used to describe harmonic motion in mathematics—meets its shadow at its bottom right. It shifts further right to merge with…

crests and waves

Geodesic folds reverberating outwards and back, a math explosion onto a white which holds the meaning of crisp. It is the production of subjectivity, dripping infinitesimal color, speckles accumulating to a small, critical mass. Amorphic, ovular dark holes, tone-full, both finished and in progress, shown upright for your inquisitive viewing nature pleasure. Here are inimitable…

Night Sky Loft; Winter Sunset, Blair Pond; Shadow Easel

Lois Dodd says she’s not an artist, but a painter. There is a knowledge that comes from making things. It cannot be reproduced by history, or philosophy, or criticism. Artists often say their hands are smarter than they are. She is a painters’ painter. Her work is a resolute refusal to conform to social, political,…

Luna del Mar

It feels as though magic is afoot in Cameron Gainer’s Luna del Mar (2012) or at least a heavy reliance on cinematic trickery such as careful lighting and extensive post-production. We see a single screen awash in blue and black, constantly in motion. At one moment a figure twists, turns, and writhes in a body…

Add-Verse

Allan Graham and Gloria Graham created Add-Verse in collaboration with 25 poets, many close friends of the couple, between 2003 and 2005. Comprising visual and audio material, great care was taken in paying homage to the many well-known people they worked with. A two-hour video loop filmed by Allan Graham documents approximately three to five…

A Kind of Rapture

In a dimly lit cubicle on the third floor of Industry City’s mammoth warehouse, six masterpieces of modern photography stare out across a room; still, serious, and open, waiting for a viewer to wander in. Of the six, four are portraits, ever so slightly larger than life and very direct—no titles, no names, no context,…

Memorial to a Marriage and Canto XXXIV: Circle Nine, Complex Fraud and Treachery

Death in the hands of an artist is almost paradoxical: while as a lived experience it is unknown and unwelcome, as the subject of art it can become a site of wonder, imagination, and inquiry. In other words: death can be generative. In the sense that it inspires the desire to make art, death is…

The Trees Form the Forest

Works by New York/Alaska-based Sienna Shields, and C. Finley of New York and Rome, are rich with texture and color. Chock-full of compiled items, Shields’s collage paintings and Finley’s mixed media mandala are comprised of layered materials that cohere together to produce whole works. These artworks are neither overwhelming nor disorganized—rather they are visually diverse,…

Mawinzhe

There is something on the move. It’s a total grey-out; a haze of billowing fog clears to reveal a shapeless form. The form appears to have two wispy arms, and at the end of each arm there are hands that gesture with charismatic force. The form is active and airy, and it weightlessly hums and…

The Banker’s Daughter

The Banker’s Daughter (2009-2010) is a relatively small oil painting (20 x 38”), with five disparate figures and one cat, all curiously placed together in a rustic kitchen. There is little character interaction except from the representation of the artist’s friend Chuck Close, whose exuberant smile of rotted teeth is directed out towards the viewer…

Cleaning Up; Meeting; Pounder

In David Humphrey’s painting Cleaning Up, a tough-girl protagonist leans back as she smokes a neon-tipped cigarette and watches a flirtatious interaction between a nearby tree’s hollows and the eyes on her shirt. The tree ogles, and the shirt—or the young woman’s chest—stares back with cheerful, saucy reciprocity. The girl knows what’s up, unperturbed and…

Rhymes with Orange

Suzanne Joelson’s assemblage of paintings titled Rhymes with Orange is a kind of visual meditation on the color orange. But just as “nothing rhymes with orange,” the paintings that comprise it live in conversation with one another, a kind of slant-rhyme that bounces meaning and formal devices from one panel to the next, throwing them…

Recovery Time City Evermore

Darren Jones exhibited four works hung side-by-side. Although they were made between 2012 and 2013 and are each composed of individual intentions, because of their proximity and significance they were, contextually speaking, separate, but acting as a collective and almost singular work. Hanging on the far left was Duct: a piece of brown paper with…

Oden Junior; Oden Senior

At first, from a distance, they appear to be maps. They come more into focus. Large patches of grass and weeds surround the grey concrete rectangles at the center of each image. There is exposed piping for plumbing or heat. Two images that only a moment ago were observed in the way one glances at…

The Plummet Machine

All things are subject to explanation by constructs that assign or impregnate their subjects with meaning. In order to construct meaning, an order is assigned to the object’s components. Out of this ordering comes the inevitability of a hierarchy. From hierarchy, we are then given a system of relations in which precedent is given to…

Hearth 2

We wouldn’t expect a straight take on the presumed comfort of “home and hearth” from Marlene McCarty. Her monumental diptych, Hearth 2 (China Camp 2009, China Camp 1976) (2010) is no exception. The two drawings (80” x 117” and 80” x 115”) describe the scene of a crime, in stereo. Both show the same low-angle…

Walking Mirrors

I return to the third floor gallery to stalk the effect of Josiah McElheny’s Walking Mirror 1 and Walking Mirror 2 on the space and the viewers. My hope is to remain unseen, to find a part of the room from which to observe without catching my own reflection in one of the mirrors, but…

An Interview

Cy Morgan: The work in Surviving Sandy feels as though it’s on a couple of different tracks all at once—some things are going in one direction; others are going in another. The work is generally concerned with gravity and the way objects project and resist forces. They also follow different valences that can oppose one…

The Collector; Oracle in Reverse

Before being about anything, Michelle Segre’s Surviving Sandy sculptures are about matter, such as the feel of their materials—from papier-mâché to milk crates—coaxed by plaster, tape, and putty into position. Many of the materials Segre uses are most often colloquially used to bind, adhere, attach, contain. Consequently, the works seem to be all joints: sometimes…

Untitled

Born from mounds of matter piled, dripped, and gently sculpted by Bosco Sodi, then left to its own devices to crack, shift, and solidify over time, Untitled evokes both past and future, while arresting one’s attention in the present. Dark rivulets, mountains, and gorges form labyrinths of a scorched post-human earth, or perhaps a distant…

Export Porcelain

In the late ’80s, I was part of a group of loosely affiliated abstract painters spanning Brooklyn and Manhattan. For these guys, and they were all guys, Gary Stephan had cult status. In particular, John Otte had a reverence for Gary’s paintings born of a short stint as his studio assistant. His roommate Erick Johnson…

Looking out to Sea III; Back and Forth; Coastal Touch

We were already blackened with charcoal that wouldn’t come out even with vigorous scrubbing after the first week of Gwen Strahle’s Drawing Marathon at RISD in 2005. It was a notorious Winter Session elective that locked students from every discipline at the School in the Foundation Studies drawing studios from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m….

An Interview

Will Yackulic’s Enigma Variations takes its name and theme from a work of music by Edward Elgar written in 1898-1899. Elgar’s composition of twelve variations on a theme is composed to suggest the personality of a friend, personifying some quirk of character through the texture of music. Similarly, Yackulic’s 24 ceramic vessels—each approximately five inches…

Untitled (Unique Color Polaroids)

There is a tragic element, as despite all the attempts at engendering an image that matches a mental picture, the woman underneath the clothes and behind the skin remains a mystery to us and to herself. The perfect projection of the internal imagined self, if it exists, only does so for the duration of the…

Constellation Vanity

Diana Cooper didn’t know what to include in the Surviving Sandy show when she was invited. She was busy, in the midst of several other shows, and skeptical, even nervous to revisit such a sensitive area. For Cooper was greatly affected by Hurricane Sandy. She lost countless works, years of early efforts (done in college…

The redefining of the defining: Martha Diamond’s Church series

The word “geometry” was coined in ancient Greece to describe the measurement (metron) of earth (geo). As such, it dealt with concerns regarding physical space, and the ways in which said space could be defined, illustrated and measured. With time, however, as notions of space began to shift from the physical to the abstract, so…

Tom and Jerry

Anyone who has ever been punched squarely in the nose can appreciate those old Tom & Jerry cartoons’ expert rendering of the experience: When struck, Tom’s face would recoil so far that it would disappear into his head. That’s not what it looks like to be punched in the face, but it’s what it feels…

Object and Illusion

It was a great pleasure for me to see Nancy Haynes and Mike Metz, an artist couple with a long tenure of making art in New York, exhibited side by side in Surviving Sandy. To encounter Haynes’s superb paintings is to see a rigorous intellectual practice executed with extreme sensitivity, restraint, and a touch of…

Herkimer Unfolded

Through a series of inventive and cogent gestures and placements Michael Joo has responded to and shaped the 100-year-old industrial space where Surviving Sandy took place. He incorporates the track lighting installed for the show into his piece Untitled (Impacted). He also lowers the piece an additional five-and-a-half-feet to the same height of the Herkimer…

Connie’s Drum; Passions According to Andrei

Margrit Lewczuk’s bright paintings titled Connie’s Drum and Green & Purple were installed facing her husband Bill Jensen’s intense diptych Passions According to Andrei (Rublev/Tarkovsky). The adjoining wall was hung with a cluster of eleven of Lewczuk’s smaller paintings, drawings and collages interspersed with eight of Jensen’s brush drawings in black ink. Where Jensen’s work…

After Louise Bourgeois; Day After Day

Deborah Kass likes to have fun but with a vengeance. Or as Eric Shiner, director of the Andy Warhol Museum, describes her, “Deb is an expert at putting a smile on her viewers’ faces, but she packs a wallop behind those smiles.” Known for her feminist vaudevillian appropriations of the great white male Pop and…

Walden

People say “once an adult, twice a child” as a pejorative for aging but Jonas Mekas has always possessed a child-like curiosity that has propelled his remarkable approach to filmmaking. Mekas is now 91 but in his nearly seven decades of making films, photos, collages, and performances, the artist never succumbed to the deadening of…

Women of Allah

Shirin Neshat is split within by the barrier without: as an exile from Iran living in the U.S. she is caught between two worlds, simultaneously of both, and also of neither. To be exiled is to be divided not only from a homeland, but also from oneself. Although it is rarely directly addressed in her…

The Anonymous Color of the Universe

Certain lines from Wallace Stevens’s great elegy for George Santayana, To an Old Philosopher in Rome, capture for me a quality in these paintings by Stanley Whitney: “On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street / become the figures of heaven.” In his poem Stevens envisions Santayana dying in a Roman hospital, in…

Flatlands

The paintings Dark Side of the Moon, Side 1 (Speak to Me) and Dark Side of the Moon, Side 2 (Eclipse), (both made in 2013) are part of a series by Tomas Vu titled Flatlands. Large and highly detailed, they feature a mixture of abstract and representational forms variously rendered through the use of acrylic…

Ocean Voices

It’s difficult to imagine what the exhibition would have been like without the late inclusion of Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Ocean Voices. It arrived one afternoon in a crate, like an animal. And when it was installed, the lumpen wooden sculpture became animate. The patchworked body of the form is made of shims and segments of…

Buddha

From a semi-transparent sail-like amalgamation, a central bamboo mast rises almost seven feet, pulling its wire skin to a peak as it ascends toward the ceiling. Its upward reach carefully countered by the object’s mass and the implied movement of the four red, rubber wheels that form its base—this behemoth is built to move. Between…

Photo-Sculptural Objects

As the son of artist Rob Ryman and art critic Lucy Lippard, Ethan Ryman (New York, 1964) was exposed to visual art at a young age. However, like his father—who originally moved to New York to become a jazz saxophonist, only to become a painter instead—he first had a successful career in music as a…

Untitled

There is bluster here. There is a wind blowing, and a fire rising prickly and rolling. There are waves. There is a multitude that shifts and solidifies and rolls out again. So may pieces in movement, block the light and reflect it back, if moving through the air. But they’re not real bullets. They’re resin….

JoDeck Mountain

Accumulation can be a really powerful force. Think about the early universe: it was all indiscriminate proto-matter, not even particles. Then, as things cooled they started to clump together, and after just a few billion years we get all the diversity of planets, star systems, life, nebulae, and so on that can be seen from…

The Battle at Goat Island

Elves? Sprites? Muscular fairies? Outcast female deities from a far off land? Naked and vulnerable with breasts exposed, they tumble through space like whirligigs set loose on a stormy day. One lies on the ground, back arched, beckoning to the various limbs that are sticking out of green bushes or maybe those are mutant fruits…

The Red and the Black

In the first iteration of G.T. Pellizzi’s dynamic installation, The Red and the Black (2013), the artist exposed the often-invisible inner workings of the art world. The art world can be separated into three general spheres of influence: 1) the artist’s labor, without which art works themselves couldn’t come to fruition, 2) the art market, which…

Field Through Trees

Ellen Phelan’s Field Through Trees, is built up and wiped away—built up again, and blurred. Purple, yellow, blue, the darkness of the tree trunks closest to us shows the strokes of paint as paint, and gives itself away even as it describes that which we are to look through. Past the trees there is a…

Fox

Rona Pondick’s world has long been one of astounding perfection crossed with disturbing, yet inviting, mutation. Phantasms of chimerical hybrids, her sculptures, have a presence and personality that make me want to sit on the floor and talk to them, or stroke their gleaming curves and limbs, or twisted plaintive heads as I pass by….

Hudson Estuary

I have always seen the background, or the space behind whatever I’m painting in the foreground, as a piece of history. 1 -Alexis Rockman It is well known that as an urban New York City kid Alexis Rockman followed his anthropologist mother through the halls of the famed Museum of Natural History where his gaze…

Cellular

Let’s pretend Alexander Ross’s large paintings of Green Giant green-bean blobby biomorphic forms contain portraits of magnified specimens of metastasizing mutant cellular structures scraped from the skin of one of Alexis Rockman’s futuristic fauna from his Hudson tryptich (Tropical Migrants, 2011), which accompanied Ross’s work in the Sandy exhibition. While gloriously abstract and humorous, Ross’s…

Canary

Unlike most barricades, Rachel Beach’s toll-gate-like structure is an invitation, rather than a barrier. Like much of her work, it comes to us as much as a painting as it does a sculpture: a zig-zagging base snakes upward in lusty gamboge, a charcoal beam rises vertically to support a horizontal arm tattooed with black <s…

Untitled (Cobblestone Constellation)

We hold our monuments to impossible standards. They are to be classical yet contemporary: elegant and consumable. They are to be mythologizing and didactic, telling an inclusive, rousing story. And undoubtedly, they must be grandiose yet meditative, inspiring feelings of both sublime patriotism and inner illumination. There is something of this impossibility in Barney Kulok’s…

NV Regional

In NV Regional (2013), a video by filmmaker Colin Snapp, a seemingly endless procession of people plod up and down a steep, switchback trail in what appears to be an otherwise desolate location. As we watch, an incessant hum in the background becomes evermore distinct; it is the score to this journey. In reality, the…

Lot 080711 (the radiant future); Lot 020412 (port)

The bright clean colors of the monochrome panels shine out from their worldly supports. In Lot 080711 (the radiant future) (2011), the support—an industrial cement mixer with a thick board that carries an orange painting—extends vertically out of the open top, while in Lot 020412 (port) 2012, a more-than-half-ton cement block with a board similar…

Fluidity of Thought

That Bob Witz’s 2011 piece, called Apollon-Musagète (or “Apollo, conducteur of the Muses”), is a reference to Igor Stravinsky’s 1928 ballet is made clear by the fact that the two pieces share a name. Based on an episode from Greek mythology in which three muses—Terpsichore (the muse of dance), Calliope (poetry), and Polyhymnia (mime)—visit Apollo,…

Just Because it’s Crumpled Doesn’t Mean It’s not Clay

It’s a strange piece, this circle of color with its missing center. Hollowed out, the rim of tinted clay seems to have been robbed of its energy as it passively hangs on the wall. The ripped-out piece of crumpled clay lying on the floor, on the other hand, seems to continue effervescing heat from within…

Flooded McDonald’s

The end of days begins serenely, peacefully. Our rush through history has reached stasis; our glittering creations glibly sparkle, frozen in a time that stretches forever in every direction. Ronald McDonald smiles horribly, welcoming us to an eerie silence. Shangri-la serves Happy Meals. Water begins to seep into this hellacious paradise, slowly at first, steadily…