Category: writing

It’s a common story of contemporary art for artists to describe abandoning the two-dimensional confines of traditional painting on canvas for the more immediate materiality of sculpture, installation, or performance. In her 2016 memoir, for example, academy-trained painter Marina Abramović recalls her decisive moment: “Why should I limit myself to two dimensions when I could make art from anything: fire, water, the human body?” New York-based painter Ginny Casey recently described a far less storied move in the opposite direction at an artist talk at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania, where her work is currently exhibited.

Ginny Casey initially worked as a sculptor and turned to painting so that she could create the kind of surreal environments that she imagined but was not physically capable of building. According to the gallery text, she now “builds sculpture with paint.” Her strange still lifes depict the tools and materials of a sculptor’s studio—knives and scissors, cuts of wood and lumps of clay, electric fans and ceramic vases—along with other, uncanny additions.

The eleven medium-to-large oil on canvas works on display at ICA inhabit a fairly large gallery: some of them are propped up on a long platform, others hang on false walls that feature rectangular cutout doorways. The set-up reminded me of painter Louise Fishman’s 2016 micro-survey at ICA, which sought to evoke the artist’s studio within the museum. (Chief Preparator Paul Swenbeck worked on both exhibitions’ designs.)

In Moody Blue Studio, 2017, each depicted object—pink-and-blue table, black scissors, terracotta figure, hovering brown disembodied hands—appears to have been carefully outlined, painted in, and then outlined again. There are no paint drips or other markers of accident; there are hardly even identifiable brushstrokes because the painting’s surface has been sanded down to a uniform flatness, invoking a deliberate, uneasy calm. Layered blotches of color create mottled, muted dimensionality. The objects ground each other, as each of them touches at least one other object. The joined-up group floats, unanchored by shadow, against the vast dream space of the painting’s royal blue studio floor and cobalt walls. A single rectangular doorway, lit from below, pierces the dark wall and echoes the cutout doorways in the exhibition design.

This impossible composition, as well as those of the other ten paintings, is reminiscent of art school still life problem sets: geometric and sculptural objects studiously set at rakish angles fill each canvas to its edges, playing with positive and negative spatial relationships, perspective, and proportion. In this way, Casey’s works at first appear invitingly straightforward. And yet they become increasingly mysterious in their handling of paint, color, and subject matter. Complementary colors placed in layers and adjacent to each other bring out the shimmer and glow of saturated oil color.

A case in point, Pressing Matter, 2015, comprises magenta rubbery rings, a gunmetal grey knife, and olive green and lilac fingers with lemon yellow fingernails against a navy backdrop. A disembodied hand hangs languidly in thin air, massaging a squashed ball of clay; dark eyes peep out of a clamshell box and watch a single (middle?) finger sticking straight up in a daring pose. This severed icon of defiance seems to celebrate painting’s powers of invention as much as sculpture’s connection to the three dimensional world.

While critics frequently compare Dona Nelson to far more celebrated postwar painters, “Painters Sculpting/Sculptors Painting” instead placed her work in conversation with that of a diverse group of younger artists. Nadine Beauharnois, Matt Jacobs, and Marc Zajack, like Nelson, are based in the Philadelphia area and remain anchored to traditional forms of painting and sculpture as well as to evergreen dialogues between figuration and abstraction. Staking her claim as the exhibition’s linchpin and underscoring her importance to subsequent generations, two of Nelson’s freestanding large-scale double-sided paintings, String Turn, 2015, and Studio Portrait over Time, 2016, faced off in the center of the gallery with the heft of opposing sumo wrestlers. Mounted on a black metal armature, String Turn features poured, dripped, and brushed acrylic, in hues of purple, yellow, green, and black, which has seeped through to the work’s verso, where the folding and stapling of the canvas over the wooden stretcher is visible. Perforations threaded with brightly painted string pock the work. Studio Portrait over Time consists of two stretched paintings on linen, each roughly the dimensions of a household door, secured nearly parallel to each other on the same plywood base. Additionally comprising glued-down muslin and cheesecloth ribbons, this slightly newer work depicts, on one side, two approximately life-size figures, one seated and shown in profile, the other standing directly facing the viewer. The shirt of the latter bears a grid pattern, the nonperspectival rendering and raised texture of which press the figure against the picture plane. All four sides of the work—the two facing outward and the reverse sides of these—feature similar motifs, creating the sense of a structure in rigorous dialogue with itself. Figuratively, this assemblage recalls Nelson’s representational paintings of the 1980s, which show people rendered in a childlike manner against shallow backgrounds; materially, it speaks to her 1990s abstractions, such as Moonglow, 1993, whose balled-up strips of cheesecloth bulge from the painting’s surface.

Perhaps inspired by Nelson’s canvas- and linen-wrapped frameworks, Jacobs, who was Nelson’s student at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art, draped swaths of pink-and-purple-dyed silk organza across a corner of the gallery and around a supporting column. Viewers could stand inside A Purple Solution, 2017, which tented off a small section of the gallery, and look through the sheer fabric to take in the rest of the room. Whereas Nelson’s most recent work directly addresses the viewer’s body by means of scale and imagery, this installation offered a subtle filter to visual perception. Nearby, Beauharnois’s brightly colored, tactile absurdist sculptures inhabited wall and plinth space. Equal parts erotic, violent, and humorous, Topless, 2016, is a papier-mâché lump in cartoonish shades of peach, magenta, and blue that variously resembles collarbones and bound breasts, a severed hand, and a plucked and trussed chicken. The work evidences a slippage between multiple representational possibilities and near-formless materiality; it is animated via this very irresolution. Similarly, the productive tension between abstraction and figuration—enacted in the confrontational staging of Nelson’s two large-scale works—appears to propel the artist’s practice.

The exhibition also included, surprisingly, one of Nelson’s much earlier and smaller square enamel paintings, which hung inconspicuously on the wall to one side of her other works. In swift, economical brushstrokes, the high-contrast black-and-white Waiting in the Park, 1982, depicts businessmen seated in front of looming trees. The work served as a reminder of the commitment to the pictorial that reemerges in varying degrees throughout Nelson’s oeuvre and additionally united many of the other two- or three-dimensional exhibited works. For example, close viewing of Zajack’s paintings Nude on Confettied Bike, 2014, and Pomping the Bust, 2016, revealed the titular images slowly emerging from a morass of highly textured oil paint. Beauharnois’s Circus Escapee, 2016, is a plaster and papier-mâché rendition of an anthropomorphized electric-blue party dress with a warm red mouth or vagina orifice at its center, and a defined front and back, both highly patterned with pink and green vertical stripes. The exhibition thus showcased the established artist less as a calcified art-historical reference point and more as an active player whose contributions to her field continue to resonate.

In his 2001 book Papier Machine, Jacques Derrida charts a cultural hierarchy of paper’s many purposes, from “priceless archive, the body of an irreplaceable copy, a letter or painting . . . as support or backing for printing” to, finally, the “throwaway object, the abjection of litter.” Chris Corales’s magpie practice restoratively collages found paper, cardboard, and related detritus into spare, abstract, yet allusive compositions that both reflect and transcend such teleological categories.

Many of the modestly sized works in this concise memorial exhibition, “A Passer-By in His Own Moment,” evoke books (and, by extension, concepts of reading, writing, and archiving) through visual and material cues. Students of the Sea (all works cited, 2014), a rectangle of found paper carefully bound in worn, toothy cerulean cloth, imitates a trade hardcover splayed facedown. Brown, green, and pale-pink slices of scavenged paper, pasted vertically down the work’s center, create a low-relief illusion of a book’s spine. Given its title and handmade aesthetic, a viewer might imagine that this book contains sketches of the ocean. In the pared-down Imitation of Home Series (5), an isosceles sliver of frayed, marbled bookbinding cloth connects two sheets of soft, gray paper torn and stained with age—a nod to their status as trash even while made new—to roughly resemble a book’s facing pages. The cloth’s edge hangs teasingly off part of the page as if it could be peeled back with a fingernail to reveal further layers of information beneath. Home Stack, an off-kilter grid of four similar collages, includes tipped-in sheets with black borders, suggesting illustration plates whose content has been entirely obscured by glued-down, oxidized paper. Corales’s works, with their yearnful lack of text and image, embrace the dwindling physicality of a medium here playfully recast as a space for narrative projection.

In Jessi Reaves’s recent exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, her sculptural furniture was integrated both formally and functionally with a group of surreal still-life paintings by fellow New Yorker Ginny Casey. Curator Charlotte Ickes described these complementary bodies of work as “two solo exhibitions.” The juxtaposition with Casey’s intensely colored paintings of unfinished objects and hovering body parts set in cavernous ateliers placed Reaves’s work within a context of conversations about the artist studio and the erotics of the psychoanalytic part-object.

A pair of green plastic garden-center chairs, Chair 1 and Chair 2 (both 2016) faced gallery visitors at the exhibition’s entrance. These two chairs were once one&emdash;the original chair had been roughly split in two, its spine and ribs built out and repaired using sections of driftwood and highly patterned fabric padding, then secured with a mixture of glue and a mystical-sounding substance that Reaves terms “studio dust.” Studio dust looks like sawdust, but it is laden with meaning, having been gathered in the place where the artistic magic happens. Reaves molds this dust into new, often extravagant shapes; she also uses it to mend or patch together pieces. Split Mess (Barley Twist Lamps) (2017) for example, is augmented with curly, seahorse legs molded in this way. This and other lamps by Reaves—including the gangly and drunkenly leaning Worthless Lump (Lamp) (2017)—punctuate the gallery, lending a theatrically domestic feel with their warm yellow light.

Several intricate wall-based works appeared both surreal and functional. Shelf with Pockets & Braid (2017) displayed subtle gradations of color and texture, including smooth silvery-grey-stained driftwood, copper-toned wood shavings, and an accidental-looking blue stain on pale chair caning. The two pockets were literally attached to the shelf as if sewn onto a coat: one was lined with cream leather, the other with cherry-red velvet, erotically daring the visitor to put their hand inside and feel around for precious things. An angular construction of blonde wood, Night Cabinet (Little Miss Attitude) (2016) is partially zippered into a translucent, glittery black and bronze silk costume, like a flimsy cocktail dress. Both of these works raise questions about the meaning of keeping certain elements partially hidden while others are visible and embellished to excess.

Visitors were permitted to sit on most of Reaves’s sculptures. Throughout the gallery, people bent down, gingerly, over the works, including the bright, shiny Slipcovered Chair (Pink Gag), (2017) and the drooping, leather-clad Mutant Butterfly Chair (2017), touching them and guessing how each structure came to be. Reaves’s work is filled with playfulness. Dog’s Toy Coat Rack (2015) appears to be made from chewed wood, with a lived-in charm. A Modernist, Eames-style coat rack (complete with spherical coat hooks) had the uncannily near-human feel of one of Louise Bourgeois’s “Personages”—a tall slender presence, its emptiness became a silent welcome to hang up our coats and play the role of invited guests in this imaginary home-studio scene.

Alchemy, Typology, Entropy at Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, features painting and sculpture by three talented artists who live and work locally: Adam Lovitz, Peter Allen Hoffmann, and Alexis Granwell. The exhibition is one of several fantastic shows curated by Alex Baker this year—including Cryptopictos, Painters Sculpting/Sculptors Painting, and Person, Place or Thing—that collectively highlight the current energy, and formal and conceptual conversations, around painting among multiple generations of Philadelphia-based artists.

Alexis Granwell’s biomorphic body-scale papier-mache sculptures on geometric wood, Masonite, and brick plinths are centrally positioned in the gallery, inhabiting it like curvier, less severe versions of Louise Bourgeois’s groupings of Personages. The painterly quality of layered, almost-patchworked paper in soft blues, peaches, and indigos, which Granwell makes by hand, lends works like Opponents (2017) a sense of ruin–as if distressed, forgotten objects had been restored with an intimate touch. This restorative gesture reminds me a little of Jessi Reaves’s broken and put-back-together furniture or Dona Nelson’s collaged constructions(which were also recently shown at Fleisher/Ollman).

Green in the face (2017), one of Adam Lovitz’s modestly sized portrait-oriented panels, combines vibrant red and green acrylic with rough sediment made from the mineral schist, which he found during a hike along the banks of Pennsylvania’s Wissahickon creek. His alchemical process involves scraping paint and mineral dust from works in progress, remixing and reapplying these materials, and further sanding and layering to produce complex topologies. In Wet Grass (2016), with the pale green and mud brown patina of an abandoned bronze that has been carved up and graffitied, the gritty paint mixture looks lovingly curdled.

A row of Peter Allen Hoffmann’s small, square oil-on-canvas works range in style from the casual Untitled (2016), a loosely rendered, sunrise yellow ombré grid—a sketch of a textile pattern—to the traditional still life study, Skull (2016), to the modernist-looking Crazy Quilt(2014), a composition of flattened geometric forms in muted browns and greens like one of Paul Cezanne’s late nineteenth-century views of village rooftops. Hoffmann draws inspiration from historical American thought and craft, hence the diversity of his imagery. The quilt-like layering of his material reflects upon the stitching together of the exhibition as a whole.

Viewing this quietly beautiful exhibition invoked a memory of the first time I saw the Argentinian painter Varda Caivano’s subtle semi-abstract paintings at Victoria Miro, London. Caivano’s observation that “paintings are like thoughts… the studio works like a head” is relevant here. Riding this simile, curator Alex Baker has succeeded in putting three artistic heads together in a fascinating spatial and visual conversation about materialized thought.

In an interview published by Philadelphia’s FringeArts (2016), Ann Hamilton describes the dual impulses behind her four-decade-long practice and the multi-site exhibition she had recently mounted in the city: “Watching a raw material become a single thread, join other thread to become a warp or weft of a cloth or carpet holds for me all the possibilities for making; sewing and writing are for me two parts of the same hand.” Organized by the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Hamilton’s sprawling text and textile project, habitus, consisted of a site-specific public installation on the abandoned Municipal Pier 9, which was part of the FringeArts live arts festival; an exhibition at FWM of Hamilton’s works and artifacts related to the region’s textile history; and an online collection of literary texts concerning the social meanings of cloth contributed by visitors at <cloth-a-commonplace.tumblr.com>.

Pier 9, which opened eleven days in advance of the FWM exhibition, provided a theatrical introduction to the themes of the habitus project. Monumental swathes of pale grey Tyvek billowed like wedding dresses, suspended on metal circles from the high ceilings of the windy, post-industrial. Visitors wandered under and through these ground-skimming sculptures and pulled at long, thickly woven ropes attached to pulleys that whirl the skirts and make bagpipe-type instruments wheeze overhead. Past these interactive sculptures were two performers—one spinning yarn from wool, another unraveling knitted garments. They worked to the accompaniment of a looped video projecting two poems by Susan Stewart on the surface of a shipping crate. As visitors turn a handle, the wheels turn, revealing further words in the poem. A free newsprint publication elaborates on Hamilton’s concerns. In the essay titled “blanket,” she observes that the words in William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1962), “like the three wheels such a cart depends on, gained momentum to generate miles of conversation. The words became an object known and turned by many hands.” This positions the various gestures of winding and unwinding performed on the pier as social, functional, and poetic. Words become objects and objects express a kind of language.

At FWM, a concise survey of Hamilton’s textile-oriented work filled the first floor, after a presentation of Stewart’s CHANNEL and MIRROR poems in installation form. White fabric tape was wound several inches deep on metal wheels; stitched in pale blue on the tape were the words of the poems. As visitors turned a handle, the wheels turned, revealing further words in the poems. Cranked back and forth from wheel to wheel, the poems were revealed as palindromes, making sense in both directions. In the survey proper, viewers encountered the aggressive affect of (suitable/positioned) (1984/2014), a man’s suit entirely pierced by toothpicks that create a protective shell and hint at a masculine vulnerability typically concealed by conventional business attire, and the contemplative untitled (1992), a concrete poem in which tiny white stones cover, like stitches, each vowel of a small printed manuscript. While the text is near-illegible, the work reaches across forms to be imaginatively read as linguistic sculpture, a text to handle with the eyes.

FWM’s second and eighth floors house collections of antique commonplace books (personal journals of copied or cut-and-pasted literary passages) and fabric sample books respectively, borrowed mainly from Philadelphia museums and archives. Viewing these collections in parallel, as analogues, both text and textile swatches documented the construction of individual lives, of subjectivities, and of cultural moments. Installed on long, low plinths extending throughout the left hand side of both spaces, cloth · a commonplace, 2016—takeaway, letter-sized printouts from the open call on Tumblr—conceptually ties together the two floors together. The online commonplace project featured excerpts from Virginia Woolf on the acute feeling of loss when there is no one to give a handmade crown to, and from Edith Wharton, who describes layers of lace, cloth panels, and carpet as luxurious class indicators.

The guided exhibition tour—mandatory because of the hundreds of delicate works—concluded on the seventh floor, a cavernous dark space lit only with a blanket-size video projection at its rear. In November, the CHANNEL and MIRROR (2016) video originally shown at Pier 9, moved to FWM, where it reprised Hamilton and Stewart’s wheel of poetry on the first floor with blurry close-ups of pale blue capitalized words sewn onto tape. In stilted movements, they inch off screen as new words appear—SWEET, SALT—prompting free association, and reminding us of the conversations that occur when objects become words and words are handled.