Recently by Daniel Larkin
Mildred's Lane
18 June - 6 September 2008
Alexander Gray Associates - 526 West 26 Street #1019
Most refrigerators are dumps. Leftovers from a midnight binge spoil in the back. That overpriced entrée you didn't really enjoy but couldn't bear to throw away because you squandered so much on it lingers. Isn't it ironic how most fridges end up collecting old food that we would rather not eat?
Then, there is cleaning out the refrigerator…. Few tasks could be more Sisyphean.
J. Morgan Puett claims the refrigerator as a site of subtle beauty from within these decadent, first-world horrors of the the 21st century. She honed her ability to find the art within a refrigerator during her stint as the ringleader of the Mildred's Lane art colony in rural Pennsylvania. That colony's output is the subject of Alexander Gray's summer group show, where one can find one of Morgan's fascinating fridges on view.
Laura Paulini's work, along with that of Derrick Melander Penelope Umbrico, was recently on view at Repetti Gallery in Long Island City.
Laura Paulini paints with her lucky chopstick. It's a cheap wooden one that she that found with a meal. Yet, the artist soon discovered that when she dipped this particular stick in tempera paint and then dabbed her birch picture planes, the dot turned out chillingly perfect. There is just something magical about the tip's shape and how it holds paint. Paulini theorizes that after many sessions of use the stick has not worn but actually calibrated to her technique. The artist has likewise honed her skill to the qualities of this chopstick. The utensil is so valuable that Paulini was tormented recently over bringing the stick along on her next residency or avoiding the risk of loss and leaving it at the studio. This modest but powerful tool looms behind each of her paintings.
Dot by dot, row by row, column by column, Paulini creates geometric Op Art patterns with a pointillist style. From a distance the Tron-like grid is clear but as a viewer approaches the field dissolves into a series of well placed dots. This game of distance and watching the image modulate with each step is one trademark of good pointillism that her works display with flying colors.
It has now been eighty-nine years since Mondrian's first grid paintings in Paris. The rigidly organized field still manages to touch a nerve on the retina. Let's forgo the predictable arguments over Rosalind Krauss's essays and appreciate the grid's tenacity when so many elements of modern painting now fall flat. The grid is like the friend you still call even though you've spent evenings cataloging his or her flaws. The grid is that dish that your mother never aces, but prepares with that bizarre twist that is her enduring signature. Paulini's work draws upon the grid's bittersweet stamina as recent painting stands between the hard rock of modernism and the harder place of what comes after.
Dirt Mansion
Judith Supine
English Kills - 114 Forrest St, Brooklyn NY
12 April - 8 June 2008
For the rest of Spring, a site-specific installation by Judith Supine will be on view at the English Kills Art Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Supine covers the walls with painted fragments of hot magenta water lilies that shimmer like fluorescent potpourri between the large green figures. This is Supine's first solo show in New York. It is another example of an artist accustomed to working on the streets entering the gallery context.
Supine presents his vibrant green figures under black light. On the day of the opening, half of the main hall was illuminated by incandescent light while the other half was under black light. The artist was so pleased by the appearance of the works under the purple bulbs that he asked the gallery to remove all the incandescent fixtures. A few did manage to remain to emphasize certain works. The black light compliments Supine's glowing color spectrum and the eerie appearance of his green figures.
The history of painters working with black lights is a modest one. Roberto Matta, to cite one example, sometimes painted under black lights but his works are never illuminated as such at MoMA. Matta's production methods fail to leave a mark on the exhibition procedure here, further asserting that in an era of extreme urban light pollution, exhibition spaces still cling to the tired model of the bright white cube. Some spaces, however take steps in a different direction: the 2008 Dark Fair at the Swiss Institute Contemporary Art in SoHo recently examined the display possibilities of candle light. Yet, in this case SI functions as an exception that proves the rule.
Artists, however, can go further than just presenting their work under a strange light. The true test is always whether unconventional illumination can tease out some quality that might otherwise be suppressed in a picture, or enhance the content that is already present. By introducing the realm of the shadow and that outlandish glow of the black light, Supine raises his work to a new level of ethereality.
Lady Pink and Aiko: Brick Ladies of NYC
Ad Hoc Art - 49 Bogart Street, Brooklyn NY
21 March - 20 April 2008
The work of Lady Pink will be on view at the Ad-Hoc Art Center in Brooklyn until April 21st. This legend of New York's graffiti scene shares the show with a younger counterpart, Aiko, who is also a rising star.
Lady Pink came of age in the old New York of the 1970s and 1980s. She made her name as the first major woman graffiti artist who held her own against the male competition when it came to gracing (or vandalizing) the trains with new designs. The city's graffiti gang would siege the MTA train yards at night, evade transit police, and write on the trains. Today's shiny silver metal subway cars were actually specifically designed to accommodate a chemical solution that can swiftly rinse off any graffiti. The old trains received a coat of red paint and were therefore a far better canvas for spray paint.
Much of the general public view spray painted trains as vandalized signs of urban decay. Those with eye for Graffiti experienced sublime suspense as the headlight shined in the distance. It would always be a surprise to see "whose" subway would pull into the station. Would it be a design that had been plowing through the tunnels for a couple of weeks? Would it be new work that was just done last night? This was the golden age of New York Graffiti.
Kori Newkirk: 1997 - 2007
The Studio Museum in Harlem - 144 W. 125 St, New York NY
14 November - 9 March 2008
At Kori Newkirk's retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem, there is a clever neon sign installed. It reads "TAKE WHAT YOU CAN."
Newkirk is keenly aware that "YOU" will deeply shape how you approach his work. Beyond the individual subjectivity of each viewer, it is a plain fact that black art intrinsically means something very different to the African Diaspora than it does to any other group. To approach any work that hangs at the Studio Museum in Harlem is to enter into the land of double meanings. Your commentator is certainly not going to claim the transcendent authority to see this art through both black and white eyes, or alternatively that it can be viewed in a color blind manner. The very act of visiting Harlem and walking through the Studio Museum's door engages the viewer in the ongoing question of race and how art explores it. To pretend otherwise would run the dangerous risk of decontextualizing the work. Newkirk tells the viewer to take what you can, knowing that everyone will take away something different.
The work is not, however, just a generic image of fire. Beneath this stunning representation, there is an image of tragedy: Newkirk seeks to invoke the fires of the 90s race riots in Los Angeles. The fact that this might not be immediately apparent when looking at the work is crucial. It emphasizes the extent to which dark episodes in the history of American racism have not been encoded into mainstream history.
In other bead curtains installed in the hall, Newkirk also harnesses the inherent pointillism of a technique of tightly aligning rows and columns of pony beads. For example one recent curtain depicts the skyline of New York with the Brooklyn Bridge in view. In this image the space between beads reads like fog over the water. The blocky composition of the half illuminated buildings and water created by the beads also appears like a heavily pixilated digital image. On the formal level, such play with focus and sharpness may have been pioneered by Richter in his fuzzy photograph series, but there is a deeper reason why Newkirk wishes to obscure this iconic view of New York’s skyline.
