Richard Whitehead
Spanning 30 years, Richard Whitehead’s painting and drawing practice reveals an abiding interest in the ways that space and place accumulate, create, and evoke meaning. If in earlier works this inquiry has pictured moody but still figurative natural and built landscapes, in his most recent body of paintings Whitehead references a seminal abstract territory, that of Aboriginal artwork. In doing so, he completes, as it were, the oddest of trajectories, given that Aboriginal painting came about at the behest of white Australian management, as a means of capturing into a controllable, sellable objet d’art the ancient earthwork practice of the country’s native peoples. At its heart, however, this fabricated style of landscape painting still references the extraordinary Aboriginal understanding of the earth, especially in terms of Songlines, and clearly it is these ideas—and not ones about the art market or colonialism—that Whitehead wishes to evoke in his own works. Whether or not this can be achieved remains to be seen, as the specter of colonialism is a sticky one, hard to shake under even the best of intentions.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Patricia Tinajero
Patricia Tinajero’s pretty macrame doilies are not some leftover hippie decorations from the 1970s. They might seem so with their happy pinks and greens, their vibrant yellows and blues, but look closer at the source of their shininess: plastic bags. Woven from that most ubiquitous marker of our cheap, disposable culture, Tinajero’s crochet disks are just one example of her brand of eco-art, a process that magically refashions disposable rejects like old foam flooring and used make-up removal pads into something new and unexpected that speaks not only against waste and for creativity but also to something more profound. This depth is revealed in collaborative works like “Carry On: Homeless Project” and “Urban Corridor,” which foreground social themes such as homelessness, a state of living in which ad-hoc solutions—not unlike the ones Tinajero puts to use in her own sculptural practice —reveal a resourcefulness sorely lacking at the more comfortable levels of social existence.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Veronica Siehl
When you were little and you wondered what happened to your teeth as they fell out of your mouth, your parents probably told you about the Tooth Fairy. What they didn’t tell you was what that pretty lady actually did with your pearly whites. Enter Veronica Siehl, printmaker extraordinaire, who reveals the truth: the Tooth Fairy swallows your teeth whole, and from them grows the structure of her body, her skeleton, her bones. Siehl narrates this and other fantastical stories in her delicate, fabulously detailed Intaglio portraits. There’s the story of the woman whose hairy legs were not flesh but a bevy of sly foxes—but you’d never know it unless she lifted her voluminous skirt of waves, as Siehl cajoles her into doing. And then there’s the lady whose towering bouffant hid a den of furry rabbits, her hair composed of the same marks as the little hares’ ears. Siehl illustrates these grrlish fairy tales with a tart twist of language and an even sassier tweak of mark-making, collapsing young ladies, wily beasts, fur clothes, and a faux-naif style into a whole that promises to turn the ear not just of the children to whom such tales are normally told, but also the adults who tell them.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Stephen Martin
In the most telling of understatements, Stephen Martin describes his practice as “squares and dots.” Not hundreds upon thousands of squares and dots—just squares and dots. And therein lies the admirable simplicity, astonishing dedication, and undeniable obsessiveness of his work. Martin creates intense fields of small, hand-drawn shapes and others of overlapping brushmarks. Generally monochromatic, they inevitably reference the many infinite fields of our world, natural and man-made: the stars in the sky, the sand on the beach, the pixels of cyberspace. And yet they are also none of those things; they are uninflected markings repeated over and over again until they eventually, or hopefully, add up to something greater than their sum. If some of his works crowd tablet-size pieces of paper, while others fill up scrolls as long as twelve feet, still one wishes to see Martin push his practice into the realm of the truly excessive, moving from the kinds of surfaces that can be rolled up and stored out of the way to those that can’t be ignored, that envelop and consume one, that cover the walls and the ceiling—or even an entire house.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Sarah Shebaro
Music today takes the digital seriously and thoroughly, a state of affairs left out of Sarah Shebaro’s decidedly analog exploration of the connections between music and visual art. Hers is a practice that trips back to the days of LPs and cassette tapes, but rather than present them for their sounds she mines them for their physical materiality, using empty cassette cases as frames, the graphic expansiveness of record sleeves as found background surfaces, the wood-paneled blackness of old speakers as sculptural monuments. It’s a practice that makes something special of the everyday and familiar, enshrining doodly Daily Drawings by framing them in the aforementioned plastic cases, finding inspiration in the tacky covers of albums no one listens to any longer. There’s a paradox to Shebaro’s presentation of musical remnants for their visual rather than aural qualities, but one far easier to grasp than that other paradox, the one where a dancer dances about architecture—and a writer writes about art.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Rachel Clark
If Philip Guston were a woman, he might have made paintings something like Rachel Clark’s. This is something that Clark herself is clearly aware of, as her painting Philip Guston Balls makes clear. And if the balls in this thick, sticky painting look more like a fleshy T-Bone than male genitalia—which is not to say they don’t also look like male genitalia—the rather unappetizing resemblance is one that finds parallels across her larger body of work. Clark is something of a dirty chef when it comes to cooking up paintings: sausages and fufu feature in the titles of works that otherwise suggest hairy phalluses, snaking intestines, rainbow poop, swarthy buttocks, and so on and so forth. The whole is accomplished with a colorful, loose, comic intensity that belies the paintings’ thoroughly scatological subject matter, as if an eminently charming young woman, knowing full well what she was doing, suddenly turned around and told the most vulgar of jokes.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Wendy Seaward
In A.S. Byatt’s short story “A Stone Woman,” a middle-aged American lady realizes, slowly but surely, that her human flesh is petrifying into the brilliant stuff of the earth. Quartz and limestone begin to run through her rather than flesh and blood, a stunning sight brought magically to life in Wendy Seaward’s woven sculpture and jewelry. Working primarily with glass and metal beads, but also precious and semi-precious stones, Seaward transforms materials that in other artisanal hands serve merely to decorate wrists and necks. Under Seaward’s touch, however, they transmogrify into complicated structures that reveal an astonishing organicism, recalling in turn coral reefs, kudzu, moss, falling water, even DNA strands. While her jewelry layers the living human body with these metaphors, her masks bring them directly together, crafting a delicate face directly out of beads—or, as Byatt suggests, finding the hard, glittery, ancient material that lurks not only beneath the crust of the earth but also the skin of the human being.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Shirley Brown
Shirley Brown’s assemblages reveal the sensitive, trained eye of a seasoned beachcomber and flea-market hound, one who finds this or that small object that everyone else has overlooked. Her artistic task then becomes to pair these odd, long-displaced materials with an often unexpected array of others, not so much to transform them as to re-present them, allowing them to better tell their particular story, one that perhaps only Brown is able to hear. In one work, a series of small, evocatively shaped corals line up against an oceanic ground to speak of lost reefs. In another, rusty machine parts, dainty shells, and a gnarled old twig compose themselves into a specifically female allegory of war and pain. Amid such seriousness, Brown’s Singer comes as a welcome bundle of energy: composed of driftwood, feathers, copper wire, wooden drawer pulls, and other odds and ends, she shimmies her way out of the junk heap right into the lightness of being, that special kind of being that’s the magical potential second life of used materials.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Chase Adams
Quoting from the messy, entrenched arenas of conspiracy theory, video gaming, and science fiction, Chase Adams fashions elusive pictures and installations. Like any epic narrative, his elaborate R’lyeh Early Warning System has its own vocabulary, world of reference, casts of characters, and an eternal pacing. And like any such work it is also nearly impossible for the outsider to grasp, though it clearly contains fascinating, perhaps even revelatory tidbits. In this inevitable obscurantism it frustrates, and though Chase provides the novice viewer with a glossary of sorts, explaining H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional city, the mysterious underwater Bloop sound, and more, still one wishes that these explanations were less expository and more visually incorporated into the installation as a whole. Epic narratives succeed in carrying the reader via total immersion, a kind of meta-tactic that holds much promise for the ambitious artist willing not to leave text behind but to find a means of genuinely integrating it.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Bryan Baker
Bryan Baker’s day job is as a printmaker at Yee-Haw Industries, but it’s easy enough to imagine him instead stuck in the back of an old corporate office, forced to file and re-file endless rows of manila folders. From amid such beige drudgery might logically—or illogically—emerge these hand-cut paper and letterpress works, wacky biomorphic forms that suggest at once piano keys, painted toes and fingernails, children’s illustrations, and paper filing systems. Gone wild, of course, from the stress of who knows what. The works’ utter weirdness compels all the more for being fashioned from such plain materials, using such old-fashioned techniques. Cut, stamp, press—and voila, somehow, out the other end of the machine, comes something you’ve never quite seen before, something both familiar and strange, something that pulls at the imagination but also repels it. It does, after all, remind one of work.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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![<h4>David Wolff</h4>
<p>At the heart of David Wolff’s experiments in the limits of visual communication seethes a very dark humor, the kind [that] clearly wonders what it might look like to paint out the corner of a room. Hence the deep black overlapping spheres that make a black hole of one section of his 2007 exhibition, There Is No Paradise. Everywhere here neutral signs and symbols are forced into playing games of confusion against their will, revealing that a) there’s no such thing as a neutral sign, b) context is everything, or at least a whole lot, and c) Sol Lewitt got soft and sweet in his old age. Wolff’s work chews on concepts and semiotics, sometimes, as above, pushing them into the three dimensional, while elsewhere, as in his most recent work, sticking to the flatter surfaces and mark-making of maps. In these drawings lines dart here and there, trying desperately to mean something, but bereft of all the extra information necessary for legible content. It’s enough to make a lost soul desperately plea for help—fortunately, Wolff has created just such a suitable contraption, the Surrender Machine, a motorized bundle of odds and ends that, once plugged in, frantically waves a white flag. To whom, and for what, depends ultimately on everything else.</p>
<p><strong>60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman</strong></p>](http://media.metropulse.com/media/img/photos/2008/04/09/1815-artbeat-60-second-Wolff_t120.jpg)
David Wolff
At the heart of David Wolff’s experiments in the limits of visual communication seethes a very dark humor, the kind [that] clearly wonders what it might look like to paint out the corner of a room. Hence the deep black overlapping spheres that make a black hole of one section of his 2007 exhibition, There Is No Paradise. Everywhere here neutral signs and symbols are forced into playing games of confusion against their will, revealing that a) there’s no such thing as a neutral sign, b) context is everything, or at least a whole lot, and c) Sol Lewitt got soft and sweet in his old age. Wolff’s work chews on concepts and semiotics, sometimes, as above, pushing them into the three dimensional, while elsewhere, as in his most recent work, sticking to the flatter surfaces and mark-making of maps. In these drawings lines dart here and there, trying desperately to mean something, but bereft of all the extra information necessary for legible content. It’s enough to make a lost soul desperately plea for help—fortunately, Wolff has created just such a suitable contraption, the Surrender Machine, a motorized bundle of odds and ends that, once plugged in, frantically waves a white flag. To whom, and for what, depends ultimately on everything else.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Eurichea Showalter and Seva
Presidential privilege has, over the past eightyears, which is to say the duration of the Bush Administration, meant an increasing infringement on the rights of free speech. This has been particularly devastating in terms of the virulent wars pursued by the GOP and the kind of protest they should incite. This situation lies at the heart of Eurichea Showalter and Seva’s collaborative installation, “Claiming Executive Privilege with Tipping Point Advantage Given by Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” which consists of a plastic barricade, the muffled sounds of an anti-war demonstration, a copy of the Presidential Advance Manual detailing White House rules for dealing with protesters, and a painting that uses a folksy, hippie aesthetic to illustrate this pathetic state of affairs. The viewer, like the picketer, finds herself corralled in a pen, able only to look out on where the action (the art) is. While the horrors of the Bush administration will not be news to anyone with a truly democratic bone in his or her body, and an installation such as this will likely not convince anyone else of said evils, nevertheless the act of being stuck in the artists’ pen forces one to confront a situation too easily forgotten on a day-to-day basis.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Alice E. Stone
Sparkly glitter, unicorns, cartoon bunnies, and colored markers go together like little girls, spice, and everything nice, but what happens when they’re overlaid atop church bulletins exhorting one to “come back to the heart of worship”? Confusion, surely, but also the surprisingly compelling whirlwind of Bible Belt beliefs, youth culture, and girl power that whirl around unhinged in Alice E. Stone’s ambitious, mural-size mixed-media drawings. Atop a background of religious ephemera printed on color paper, Stone drafts the stuff of every little miss’s fantasy—and then some. Lurking amid the pretty orange sunsets and green leaves lies a house in flames, a rabbit in fishnets, and a men’s urinal, among other more adult surprises. And if some of her drawing technique recalls children’s doodles, others suggest the kind of compulsion at work in Louise Bourgeois’ Insomnia Drawings. And like Bourgeois’ work, which epitomizes the fusion of the biographical, fantastical and cultural, Stone’s unexpected yet weirdly familiar hybrid work invites the viewer in with its colorful familiarity, only to reveal the most uncanny of combinations at play.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Marcia Shelly
Painting under the moniker Maru, Marcia Shelly practices a vibrant, broad form of genre painting that touches on such time-honored, pleasure-seeking subjects as the great outdoors, floral still-lifes, figurative portraits, and animal scenes. Her style varies from work to work, as if seeking out the most enjoyable approach: textured mountainscapes, flat and luminous plains, jazzy likenesses, soft-focus blooms, sketchy tourist pictures. Of these, Maru’s vertiginous, oddly colored peaks appeal most, revealing a parallel between subject and object, paint and referent—the rough, irregular pigment reads as tough and sublime as the real thing, or, at least, a marvelously idealized version of that thing. “Swan,” a quirky illustration of just that, offers a radically alternate take on the depiction of flora and fauna, pitting a suave, abstracted sunset against the inky sketch of a bird. One wonders what would happen if the waterbird took off in the direction of the mountains.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Erin-Monique Shelton
People are inherently messy, not in terms of the relative order or disorder with which they keep their stuff or run their lives, but rather in terms of emotion, personality, history, and relationships. It is this actuality that Erin-Monique Shelton depicts in her portraits, rather than the superficial tidiness of individuals. Hence the muddied, marred, and beautifully confusing figures that her subjects reveal, notably those named Elsie Mary and Anaja. Curiously, it is those works bearing specific names that most compel, perhaps because they promise to reveal the most meaningful of disarrays, real human ones, rather than the more obscure, aesthetic ones at play on a non-objective canvas. The mush of abstraction rarely holds as much promise as that of a person.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Bran Rogers
If Tim Burton were Mexican and a lover of portraiture, he might have created something like the strange pictures that Bran Rogers configures out of media as disparate as watercolor, clay, and digital photography. Which is to say that Bran Rogers is doing something utterly peculiar and charming, creating intimate portraits of Hallowe’en and Day of the Dead figurines that he himself fashions by hand out of two- and three-dimensional media. These dress-up witches, caped vampires, and carefully turned-out skeletons pose against backgrounds that fall somewhere between old-fashioned ornamental wallpaper and out-of-sync, off-scale decorative motifs. Each of his characters suggests a story, practically begs for a larger narrative in which to encounter other creatures like themselves—without one, their loneliness is palpable, sweet, and just a little bit heartbreaking.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Denise Stewart-Sanabria
If drawing traditionally provides an intimate medium through which to sketch, record, and transmit both the loosest and most precise of figurative detail, Denise Stewart-Sanabria’s practice turns that tradition on its penciled head. Life-size and larger-than-life-size, her charcoal on birch plywood drawings dwarf the viewer, existing as uncanny representations of average folks in real space. The works don’t make as much as they might of their wood grain, which suggests so much promise for unexpected skin effects, but they are otherwise true to the specificities of their original pairing of mediums. Unlike photorealist versions of the same, Sanabria’s pictures function at a double remove from reality, effecting a hand-made, grayscale virtuality and also one that, because of how the artist mounts her work, literally stands in the viewer’s space. It’s as if we stepped into a world—one that looks strangely like the early a-ha music video Take On Me—where people magically and suddenly become drawings of themselves, and no less animate for it.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Jose Roberto
The trick of much Surrealist painting lies in the believability of its what-if-ness, the undeniable realism of the impossible scenarios proposed by artist on canvas. It’s a strategy marshaled whole-heartedly by Jose Roberto, who in his digital paintings freely samples situations and spaces from the likes of Magritte, Dalí, and de Chirico, as well as the decidedly un-surrealist Edward Hopper. Roberto’s allegorical themes, however, stray as far from the psychoanalytic as can be, suggesting not the traps of repressed desire and early experience but rather those of fate. Hence the overbearing hands that control the street figures of “The Puppet Master,” the guiding narrative of “Paradise Lost,” the godly sculptor of “Killing Me Softly,” the murderous giant scissors of “We Have to Talk,” the imprisoning bars of “Forbidden Love.” For all his trafficking in destiny, however, Roberto’s scenes also ask their own kind of what-if question, but one that instead interrogates the reality of painting, proposing that a ball might be thrown through the depicted window or that the lights might be turned off the pictured sky, thereby meshing the hand of fate and that of the artist.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Brian Pittman
From the 12th to the 16th centuries, Europe saw the rise of those fantastical structures so acutely referred to as Medieval skyscrapers: the Gothic church. With its flying buttresses and pointy spires reaching to the heavens, structures like Paris’s Nôtre-Dame-de-Grace spoke not only of human ingenuity but also of hubris, the desire to marshal technical progress to religious heights. It’s the kind of desire that led to the toppling of the mythical Tower of Babel, and it’s one that also lies at the obsessive heart of Brian Pittman’s meticulous drawings. A professional architect, Pittman has continued the student’s task of drafting great structures from sight but has twisted it to adult ends, revealing through repetition and exaggeration the more excessive ends of religious ambition. His is a tricky tactic, hiding fanaticism under the seeming order of rigorous representation, and in that it is both discomfiting and revelatory, as are the sources of his inspiration.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Megan Ramsey
In the hands of the artist, clay has every possibility and freedom of form, at least until dried, glazed, and fired. Likewise pen and paper, meeting under the creator’s touch, bespeak a world of possibility arrested only by the decision to put cap back on pen. How paradoxical, then, is the work of Megan Ramsey, who in these two media creates representations of the most beleaguered of souls: heads and hands imprisoned in planes and tubes, dangling from the ends of spineless, elongated necks, manipulated by the overbearing palm of a godly puppeteer. These “people” clearly recognize their awful lot, wearing their discomfort and sorrow plain on their faces. It’s a bleak fate uniquely and curiously tempered in Ramsey’s sketch of a deer with a human face. Underneath big, beautiful antlers, this hybrid creature manages something none of the artist’s other characters seem capable of: smiling.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Alison Oakes
Beauty and pain should not traipse down the avenue hand in hand yet they do, the one shiny and pretty, the other pockmarked and bruised. Alison Oakes’ meticulously painted surfaces abstract the place where they come together, a place both familiar and ignored, a place locatable as the body, inside and out. If her veined, blemished oil paintings resemble anything it is human skin, but they recall even more that which pulses and groans under its surface, whether that surface be caked with make-up, covered by bandages, or bared to the light. Concave tondi conflate portraits with powder compacts, while irregular painted porcelains recall extravagant acrylic nails, but ones that reveal the flawed rather than the airbrushed body. Perhaps most unsettling of all are those moments where the battered human surface slips into the decorative, painterly one, as varicose veins and pustular rashes become so much marbling and moody brushwork.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Laurel Panella
Snarky, tart little girls keep walking in and out of Laurel Panella’s paintings. Mostly they snub or otherwise dis whoever else happens to be hanging around the picture plane: plaintive men in dark suits, handsome jugglers, gloomy swashbuckling types. Sometimes, when there’s no one to ignore, they just stand around, pretty but dazed, as if unsure where to direct their energy. In other canvases the gauzy, patterned fields that serve as the girls’ occasional background take over completely, forming non-objective experiments in mark making, style, and color. The tension between figuration and abstraction, an anxiety seemingly held in check by the fierce little misses themselves, is thematized in an icky green-and-bubble-gum-pink number where a hot young thang in her mini-dress leers at a blobby figurine, just daring it to dissipate further into formlessness. She knows the power of having a figure, it seems.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Lakesha Moore
Abstraction and architecture share a long and fine history within modernist painting. Artists as diverse as Mondrian and El Lissitzky used geometrical images to connote spaces of utopian perfection, a kind of space that can only exist in the imaginative plane of the picture. It’s a space that Lakesha Moore builds in her large-scale canvases, employing a washed-out system of grids and arcs that suggest not so much an area for stepping into but rather an ideal, light-filled one in which the mind and the eye have room to expand. In keeping with the modernist tradition, then, her paintings imagine not fantasy places for real bodies but rather extraordinary ones for mental sitting and wandering. Big enough to walk into but bereft of painted figures, they don’t so much invite the viewer in physically as psychologically, to take an expansive trip up twisting, precarious staircases and underneath domed latticework.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Aaron McIntosh
At once compelled and repulsed by his family’s clutter of relics, Aaron McIntosh has devised an ingenious practice of quilting that allows him to both organize and re-symbolize the material detritus of a young man’s life. Using techniques and materials both familiar and not, McIntosh stitches together meaningful stuff in combinations that reveal poignant, interrelated themes. Pockets of pale brown human hair and childish drawings of anatomy bespeak a tender focus on the young body. Pages excised from romance novels write of courtly love, while those torn from dictionaries connote categorization and labeling, and therefore stereotyping. The recurrent motif of the target loops together many of these themes, giving them a painful but indirect quality, much as in the work of Jasper Johns, king of the target, who used the mark as a secret sign for the doubly targeted homosexual body: at once the focus of desire and danger, love and despair. McIntosh invokes these themes too, but where Johns encased them in the mummifying material of encaustic, McIntosh carefully swaddles them in the soft, precious fabric of a quilt.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Jessica Meyer
Though sometimes indistinguishable from standard tattoos, Jessica Meyer’s most fantastical designs treat the body as a different kind of canvas, not Ray Bradbury’s famous illustrated man but rather an illustrated woman, one for the aggressively sexy, culturally hybrid, and totally temporary world of today. Using a technique she devised out of the methods of commercial temporary tattoo production and hand lithography, Meyer fashions fantastical human landscapes that combine motifs seemingly drawn from both Japanese animation and the country’s long history of ink painting, specifically in terms of the depiction of ghosts and geishas. Add to this the most bizarre and sexually promiscuous of octopuses, plus some abstract nativist patterns, and voila, out steps the fiercest of seductive womanscapes, at least for as long as the applique lasts.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Hans Schmitt Matzen and Gieves Anderson
The body of work collaboratively generated by painter Hans Schmitt Matzen and photographer Gieves Anderson acts as a systematic, back-and-forth dialogue meant to stimulate the creation of artwork through feedback loops and sampling, not unlike the means by which much contemporary music is created. But music is not their thematic, rather the history of art is, or at least the very post-structuralist way that they perceive art to have been made over time, in terms of every work being inextricably tied to all the works that came before it. What’s notable about their focus is that they tackle it not via the themes, images or styles passed along from one artist to another but rather in terms of influence as such. Hence the visible surface of their prints does not directly represent their subject—though the depicted liquid ebbs, ivy tangles, hexagonal floor tiles, and architectural spaces are certainly legible —but rather one that must be teased out in between the lines or, rather, inside the loopholes created across the meta-artwork they’ve so aptly titled The Loop Project.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Lee Marchalonis
To fit two years of one’s life into a bound journal takes a feat of condensation, either of content or of scale. Between 2004 and 2006, Lee Marchalonis appears to have lived a life of intense travel, experience, and observation, and if she has edited a word of it out of her written account of this time I don’t know where it has gone, for Marchalonis is a goddess of the fine-tipped pen, able to compose text at a mind-boggling scale of thousands of words per page, just as monks do on a grain of rice—or at least so it seems. Interspersed amid the words of her diary are hand-drawn scrolls that bear mottos rich in humor, self-deprecation, and the quirkiness of language. “Maybe today I’ll get hit by a bus,” reads one. “Pretty good but not the best,” says another. Curiously, when these banners find their way into Marchalonis’s series of crisply moody prints of birds on a telephone wire, they grow speechless, spooling empty ripples of white ribbon across the sunset sky, as if in defiance of the need to declare anything specific at all, at least not then, not there, not when the sky casts such a stunning glow, the wires such a magical shadow, the birds such a fantastical sight.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Eric Knowles
If Matthew Barney were a painter, not a sculptor, preferring oil paint to Vaseline, he might make videos that look something like Eric Knowles’s. But he’s not and he doesn’t, so Knowles has more or less cornered the market in conceptual, painterly and deftly pathetic explorations of athleticism and machismo. Over and over in his videos, Knowles uses his own soft, post-athlete physique to wrestle, punch, train with, shoot at, and otherwise make sport with painting and drawing. The actions are desperate both in terms of athletic prowess and artistic effect: the ball goes long, the portrait’s retrograde; the fight’s a draw, the mark-making lame. The combination, however, has the welcome effect of a double negative or a joke made at one’s own expense, at once hilarious and disarming, it plays a risky game and wins by losing.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Cindy Latham
Never much of a video game player, I nevertheless want to shoot up the flying rhinestones of Cindy Latham’s animation, We Traveled So Far. Self-possessed and endlessly multiplying, they travel the world in search, presumably, of consumers to take down. Much like the global trade in gems, among other goods, they crisscross the ocean with ease, finding their way into the suburban American home. Pointing up the ills of consumption is no small feat, and Latham has chosen to do it with a tricky, difficult bag of tools, among them abstracted I-Beams, grids, and other geometric forms that connote construction booms and raw materials. Sometimes these are drawn, sometimes animated into alternately obscure or more direct scenarios. Hitting one over the head with an anti-consumerist message just won’t do, as Latham clearly senses; but it remains to be seen if her more distanced, graphic tactics can succeed where didacticism is sure to fail.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Lauren Karnitz
If Lauren Karnitz is working within the long tradition of landscape painting, hers is a perverse, up-to-date reversal of its conventions. Where Romantic painters sought to bring the vast, sublime outdoors to the controlled viewing space of the canvas, Karnitz seeks out that most banal and diminutive of subjects, the American suburban lawn. But as the contemporary painter is wont to do, she finds in this everyday sight seeds of surprise and storehouses of strange energy. Under her scribbly, swooping brush, blades of grass become not just towering flora but shimmering flames—as well as paint, pure and simple and weird. Sometimes a picture is not the thing it depicts but just paint, that mysterious oily matter. This tension between subject and substance is most precariously at work in the ribbons of white paint that wind across Karnitz’s pictures, snaking through the grass like wordless banners, unhinged horizon lines, or even a prankster’s roll of unwound toilet paper. Whatever they might be, their jarring liveliness ties the landscape together but also acts to keep out unwanted visitors, as if to say: Don’t walk on the grass.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Jean Hess
Jean Hess constructs the kind of objects one dreams of finding in an antique curio shop but never, ever will: meticulous, poignant fragments of the past, remnants of magical childhood experiences. The reason these artifacts could never be chanced upon is that they demand the most reticent, particular of constructions, the slightest of additions and selections: a mint green circle here, a sky blue rectangle there. Here a blossom, there a geometrical diagram. Hess layers these and other unexpected layers atop pages torn from old textbooks and notebooks, pages on which long-lost children scrawled mean graffiti and warring doodles. Sometimes these new combinations create seemingly legible narratives, sometimes fantastical collapses of time and space, as if from the inner child of today all the way back to the one of yesteryear.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Annamaria Grundlach
The perfect human body is not the subject of Annamaria Grundlach’s practice. For all that her work “I See You, Do You See Me?” references classical sculpture—from its posture to its missing arms and legs, which in the case of Roman figures would have been broken off—it leaves behind all the idealism that that era placed onto the human body. Instead, Grundlach crafts a female torso whose sexuality is dubious, nearly hermaphroditic; whose smooth, calm face is obscured by a textured veil; whose skin is marred by full-body bruises and a web of slashes. As if that weren’t enough, the figure’s chest is torn open, revealing her hollowness but also, surprisingly, a small, flat angel, which dangles from a wire affixed to the back inside wall. This seems to suggest that the earthly body, for all its weakness, can find hope in the small soul that floats within and up to some kind of heaven. Alas, that soul here takes the form of a cookie-cutter figurine, and so one has no choice but to return to the beaten clay body, hoping to find life in its shell.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Briena Harmening
The deep discomforts on view everywhere in Briena Harmening’s multimedia practice are both physical and emotional, inseparably and unmistakably so. If the inclusion of text like “stop more lube” and “she’s full of excuses” doesn’t make this clear enough, then phrases such as “my vagina shrank without estrogen” spell it out with a no-holds-barred directness. But Harmening’s work is never just verse nor is it ever merely literal; she marries material with word such that the pain of her message becomes poetic. Pillowcases and lingerie suggest intimacy, hot glue doubles as sexual lubricant, wooden palettes double as slashed and upturned beds. If most of these works function as aggressive, tactical declarations, lyrical signboards that should and do stand as something to be read, others seem to ask for a different kind of activation, a site-specific one, where viewers or performers are forced to endure the task of sleeping on Harmening’s harsh pillows, eating at her lonely table, and resting in her uncomfortable bed.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Ken Gruber
The subjects of Ken Gruber’s painted scenes—from sexy mermaid and bewinged He-Man warrior to thorn-wearing Jesus, dapper Phantom of the Opera, and strutting cowboy—seem at first unrelated. But cacophonous as they might be, they reveal the fantastic themes at work in the mind of a man incarcerated behind bars, where the power of the imagination can play one of its most notable, radical roles. The pieta forms a recurrent theme, structuring pictures of not just Mary and Baby Jesus, but also the grown Jesus and a young girl, a cowboy and his young swashbuckling son, and the Phantom and Christine. However, it is the blissed-out cowpoke riding a wildly bucking bull that comes closest to thematizing the act of dreaming itself; eyes closed, he rides as if in a trance, swimming in washes of yellow and ochre paint that taint the entire picture plane, melding cowfolk, animal, and rodeo into an unreal zone of desire, one that bespeaks a heady mixture of both freedom and control.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Joyce Gralak
More so than wax, control keeps together the found objects and photocopies of Joyce Gralak’s mixed media works. It’s a strategy the artist avows up front, titling a delicate juxtaposition of 1950s imagery—shirtdress, dainty ladies pump, little gold beads, a plastic horse—with the declaration “Under Control.” Wax, as so eminently proved by Jasper Johns, makes the most paradoxical of materials, at once tender and mummifying, loving and constraining. In Galak’s recycler’s hands, it serves to both gather, select, order, and present a vast range of odd images and objects. Sometimes, as in Half Full, the effect is one of too much divide and separation, closing down any dialogue that might occur between the mushrooms, butterflies, and tomatoes. In works like Cocky Locky Takes a Drag, however, Gralak’s tactics result in an unexpected layering that opens up a chain of signifiers, encouraging messiness and discourse, allowing the viewer to listen in on the strangest of conversations.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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Bobbie Crews
A versatile painter of seascapes and what might be called fantasy portraiture, Bobbie Crews has also turned out more formally and conceptually challenging works that alternately play with the conventions of watercolor and those of figurative representation. In Helicopters, she marshals a chromatic array of kaleidoscopic organic forms that connote the peculiarly appealing notion of butterflies flying underwater; drippy and dizzy, they play with the watery possibilities of their medium and then some. The Survivor Project, a series of dozens of small portraits of individuals who’ve experienced domestic violence, also reveals a deft confidence with watercolor, but more importantly asks questions about what can and can’t be communicated through the depiction of a face, what can and can’t be hidden behind that face, willingly or not. It’s a brave theme for a portraitist to tackle, not only because domestic violence remains a taboo subject but because the multiple frames through which Crews depicts each individual suggest that no picture can ever tell the entire story.
60 Wrd/min Art Critic Lori Waxman
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