Author: Merrily Kerr

Violet Hopkins‘ latest paintings won’t blow your mind, but her subject matter might. A hand holding a frog, a spiraling shell and more seemingly random subjects are actually based on photographs encoded on a solid-gold laser disc sent into space aboard on the 1977 Voyager mission as a primer to life on Earth for anyone out there who might be interested. Thirty years on, with interest in aliens confined mostly to the movies and economic concerns trumping the cosmos, Hopkin’s project neatly summarizes the current national psyche while posing the question of how one would create such a summary today.

With their fuzzy photorealism and drab palette, Hopkin’s small ink and pencil paintings redirect attention from themselves to Voyager’s impossibly ambitious aim of depicting everyone and everyplace. The show’s two largest works acknowledge the daunting nature of the task: A close-up of an eye reflecting a solar eclipse represents a quintessentially awesome experience which should actually blind its subject, while a rendering of the instructional diagram inscribed on the golden record looks undecipherable. The landscapes and portraits in the show, along with two ‘indexes’ – gridded images showing the vast variety of human achievement – would be of little use to E.T., but are uncomfortably revealing nonetheless, especially in our security-conscious times.

While the country may be more inwardly focused now than three decades ago, Hopkins, at least, gives us a chuckle with one image here of a groovy 70s landscape painter working in his chalet-style studio. Dated stereotypes aside, her project acknowledges art’s challenge to interact with a vast, ever-changing world.

It’s understandable that Lara Schnitger would want to move on after a decade of making her signature anthropomorphic bundles of wood and fabric. Too bad the three new sculptures in her latest solo show outshine the main offering, a series of lackluster fabric-on-canvas “paintings.” Wittily evoking recognizable character types like a glitzy matron or glamorous belle of the ball, the sculptures are suggestive and humorous while the paintings rely too heavily on contrasting patterns and colors.

Not that Schnitger’s use of materials is unappealing, as attested to by one arresting portrait of a mother with a glowing mass of orange hair and a nude body rendered in crags of bleached black fabric. Elsewhere, a stately Morticia Addams type flashes a leg from beneath a black, lace-stenciled dress while almost incidentally holding a tiny baby. Neither piece packs the punch of Schnitger’s earlier photocollages of babies with porn actresses, nor makes substantial comment on sexuality and motherhood.

Gratuitously erotic images—a bottom in the air, an anorexic onanist—and darkly symbolic pairings of women with cats or a crow have purely aesthetic purpose, though a more ambitious, bestial remake of Bronzino’s racy ‘An Allegory with Venus and Cupid’ avoids the anonymity of the other paintings’ mask-faced characters.

By contrast, Schnitger’s wry sculptural figures are the life of the party: A pointy armature on a pedestal becomes a big-busted grande dame in a gaudy getup, a skinny character in lingerie seems to trip over her own kinky outfit, and a stork-legged starlet struts in stilettos and a magnificently gaudy ball gown.

Can an artist use rhinestones and still be taken seriously? At first glance, Mickalene Thomas’s sparkly portraits of provocatively posed models hardly seem destined for the art-historical canon. But beyond the gaudy veneer, her paintings and videos empower their subjects—Middle-aged African-American women with different body types but a uniformly charismatic appeal—making this artist’s long-awaited New York solo-show debut uncommonly upbeat and inspiring.

In the front gallery, Thomas creates a minicatalog of inherited (and subverted) possibilities for expressing female identity, including an odalisque decidedly more modest and less youthful than Manet’s, minus the African servant. A huge grid of headshots recalls the look of Warhol’s photo-booth portraits but not their chilly mood. When they pull thoughtful poses or throw their heads back in laughter, Thomas’s models imitate the predictable conventions of music industry portraiture, but at least their pleasure is infectious.

This is even truer in three videos in the back gallery, shot at photo sessions that Thomas uses to create source material for her paintings. Fran is tickled by her own cheesy poses, while Sandra (the artist’s mother) flirts with a Robert Melee–style “eccentric mom” moment by donning a hideous dress and looking sour, until finally cracking a big grin. Shown in slow motion, sometimes with the camera tilted disorientingly, the models are objectified, especially the awesomely curvaceous Keri. But Thomas doesn’t make much of this or try to check our impulse to assume we know her subjects because we enjoy their pleasure in posing. Instead, the takeaway is a celebration of unconventional beauty that’s hard not to appreciate.