Trisha Donnelly at Casey Kaplan Gallery

by Merrily KerrReviewsPosted on Comments are Disabled
Trisha Donnelly, Untitled, 2010. Photograph courtesy of Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York.

It says something when an artist can produce an exhibition of totally abstract artwork that runs the risk of being too obvious, but Trisha Donnelly’s latest solo show is almost unsettlingly easy to read. With no gallery statement and only one titled work, a few things are still left up in the air, but this show’s layout and content make for a pleasant, if straightforward, journey through the artist’s thought process.

A kidney-shaped desk (a found object) titled The Secretary, which greets visitors in front, seems at first uncomfortably obtuse, blocking access while posing the question of what we’re meant to glean from it. Only in the next room do its feminine curves make sense in comparison with a pretty pink marble sculpture, adorned with concave impressions that evoke breasts or eyes and appear to channel Brancusi. It seems we’ve stumbled on the secretary herself, a surprisingly primal creature, minimally altered from her natural state but with striking features nonetheless.

Such amusing opportunities for personification eventually peter out as Donnelly, who used a rotary saw to incise columnar and grille-like shapes into two sculptures, settles for the traditional role of mason. This suggests that while her contemporaries are content to dig into modernist history, Donnelly goes further back in time, mining raw material from the same earth as the ancients (the pieces are made out of limestone quarried in Bolzano, Italy). She calls to mind their labors while producing forms that resonate with contemporary life.

Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 769, June 24 – 30, 2010.

Patricia Esquivias at Murray Guy

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Patricia Esquivias, "Natures at the Hand." Photograph courtesy of Murray Guy, New York.

Patricia Esquivias’s immediately likable narrator voice is the hook in her major new video,Folklore III, keeping us engaged through dull, repetitive images and the creeping suspicion that there is less to the historical connections she weaves between two lands—Galicia, Spain; and Nueva Galicia, Mexico—than her deadpan delivery suggests. Unsupported by video evidence, the details Esquivias describes—childlike decorations on the houses, a vast unfinished monument—gradually come to seem more fanciful than believable, and thus, wonderfully entertaining.

Old Galicia represents endings—we see scenes of the coastline and hear about the rituals enacted there—while new Galicia presumably offers a fresh start to immigrants. Yet it’s the Old World that hosts a peculiar and inherently hopeful architectural custom, whereby homeowners build successively larger floors onto their buildings, creating edifices shaped like inverted Aztec pyramids. Such optimism in the future contrasts with the stasis of Nueva Galicia, where newcomers never really find their feet, subtly upending the assumption that newer is always better.

The show’s second major piece, Natures at the Hand, (from 2006) reverses tactics by favoring visuals over story, though it continues to forge similarly tenuous historical or thematic connections—comparing topiary in European castles with that in Guadalajara’s front yards, for example. Collaging disparate images together to create new narratives is a common strategy these days (Fischli and Weiss and Fia Backström come to mind), but Esquivias makes the approach her own by delighting in the simple absurdities of life, and evoking a cross-border culture in which the fluidity of facts meets the charms of quirkiness.

Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 768, June 17-23, 2010.

Thomas Houseago, “The Moon and the Stars and the Sun” at Michael Werner Gallery

by Merrily KerrReviewsPosted on Comments are Disabled
Thomas Houseago, "Spoon IV," 2010. Photograph courtesy of Michael Werner Gallery, New York.

The sculptures in Thomas Houseago’s first New York solo show defy reigning art trends by embracing monumentality, mining art history for subject matter without being overacademic or self-conscious, and conveying meaning without detailed background info. None have the commanding presence or shape-shifting potential of the artist’s towering Baby, a standout in the current Whitney Biennial. But his totemic and iconic pieces, made with labored simplicity, plumb life’s mysteries with hopeful optimism.

A line of skulls just inside the gallery would be grim if not for their wealth of associations, from Darth Vader’s mask to Picasso’s haunting late self-portraits. Jonathan Meese’s Cubist-indebted faces come to mind, but Houseago’s heads are more in keeping with the simple, alien grotesquery of Ugo Rondinone’s all-black visages. With their hollow, zombie eyes, quizzical semi-squints and fingerlike ropes of flesh on their faces, the figures float between life and death, pop culture and high art.

The show itself ambitiously aims to be many things at once—figurative and abstract, humorous and serious, historical and contemporary—but it feels crowded and thematically discordant at times. It’s tempting to hunt for humanist metaphors to tie together pieces like the two giant spoons à la Claes Oldenburg (nourishment?) and the Brancusi-like totem with bird’s head/bike helmet on top (spirituality?). Other objects make more fruitful associations: A repeated circle pattern appearing in a ghoulish face, a geometric frieze, and a sculpture representing sunrise and sunset merges personal and cosmic concerns, connecting dark souls to shining celestial bodies—and speaking for art’s ability to enlighten.

Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 764, May 20 – 26, 2010.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation University at Susan Inglett Gallery

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The concept behind the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s third New York solo show is more engaging than the artwork, which comes as no surprise.  The anonymous artist collective’s move to start its own free, unaccredited school is a gutsy and overdue reaction against the pressure on artists to complete costly MFA programs.  But just as student work generally hasn’t had time to mature, the sculpture created by the artists known as ‘the Bruces’ in response to the past semester’s discussions and plans for the future is more a collection of ideas than a profound statement.

Sculpture in the form of chalkboards summon the spirit of Beuys, while unusable desks fashioned from broken drywall resemble post-apocalypse Bauhaus furniture; neither looks meant to last.  Literally erasable, the chalkboards epitomize the experimental, non-product-driven nature of the Bruces’ approach.  Humor is rampant, from a blackboard reading ‘in the future everyone will be a foundation,’ a twist on Warhol’s famous 15-minute bon mot, to a study of art world gender disparity with a female superhero mask and hairdryer balancing a beer stein with a fake breast.  Obviously, these artists are having a good time inspiring each other and now a larger audience of ‘university’ attendees.  The resulting artwork may not stand the test of time, but it’s an enticing invitation to join the fun.

Originally published in Flash Art International, March – April, 2010.

John Bock at Anton Kern Gallery

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John Bock, installation view, 2010. Photograph courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

The remnants of John Bock’s current performance at Anton Kern Gallery—a floor littered with Plexiglas sheets covered in marker drawings, smiley-face stickers and sausage slices; a suitcase full of handmade, low-tech mechanisms—speak to the artist’s willingness to mine the ridiculous, grotesque and nonsensical in order to build fantastical, alternative realities. The new work, including two videos shot in Korea and a series of wall sculptures, offsets confusion with absurdity, striking an appealing balance between eccentricity and humor.

Bock’s videos feature an assortment of antiheroes who use a revolving lineup of devices to navigate unfamiliar terrain. The live performance distills this same sort of activity, via a hired dancer who tests a series of contraptions cobbled together from wood, stuffing and masking tape, as Bock diagrams his actions in rapid-fire sketches on Plexi. Like an artistic MacGyver, Bock’s resourcefulness in crafting, say, a sandbag-like weapon out of a pair of tights enables his characters to meet the challenges of an illogical world.

Just as performance partially decodes Bock’s frenetic, abstract diagrams, a mini horror movie, Büsche (Box), pokes fun at the psychological drama of a longer video titled Para-Schizo, ensnarled, in which two muttering loners employ totems and devices to walk, eat and engage in a destructive love affair. Their tools don’t fix anything: One character meets an abject death, the other finds a secluded peace, suggesting that while life may present us with obstacles, our efforts to overcome them—reasonably or not—are still valiant.

Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 756, March 25 – 31, 2010.